Give us courage and gaiety and the quient mind . . .

When I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.

We look for some reward of our endeavors and are disappointed that not success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun.

The friendly cow, all red and white, I love with all my heart; She gives me cream with all her might, To eat with apple-tart.

Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honorable defeat to be a form of victory.

It is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first time after long, like the flowers in spring, to reawaken in us the sharp edge of sense and that impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes out of life with the coming of years; but the sight of a loved face is what renews a man's character from the fountain upwards.

Children are certainly too good to be true.