There was no freedom in life, and certainly there was none in death.

For nothing was simply one thing.

Nothing, however, can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker’s.

Why have I so little control? It is the case of much waste and pain in my life.

When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?

Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontes and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.