“There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.”

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.

Appearances have very little to do with happiness.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

“Abroad,” that large home of ruined reputations.

Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.

My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes.

To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.

We are led on, like little children, by a way we know not.

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty – it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.

It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings. It refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks.

Conscience is harder than our enemies, Knows more, accuses with more nicety.

There is no killing the suspicion that deceit has once begotten.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine–something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.