The time for speaking seldom arrives, the time for being never departs.
You will be dead so long as you refuse to die.
A man must learn to love his children, not because they are his, but because they are children, else his love will be scarcely a better thing at last than the party-spirit of the faithful politician.
Blessed be the true life that the pauses between its throbs are not death!
I know my Easts and Tom Brown, you see, and they’re never happy unless their morality is being tried in the furnace and they can feel they are doing the right Christian thing and never mind the consequences to anyone else.
As I said to Speedicut, it’s hell in the diplomatic.
Will is not unfrequently weakness.
To judge religion we must have it – not stare at it from the bottom of a seemingly interminable ladder.
Common people, whether lords or shop-keepers, are slow to understand that possession, whether in the shape of birth or lands or money or intellect, is a small affair in the difference between men.
There is no cheating in nature and the simple unsought feelings of the soul. There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning.
The whole trouble is that we won’t let God help us.
There is but one thing that can free a man from superstition, and that is belief. All history proves it. The most sceptical have ever been the most credulous.
Were I asked, what is a fairytale? I should reply, Read Undine: that is a fairytale.
What distressed me most – more even than my own folly – was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?
The direst foe of courage is the fear itself, not the object of it; and the man who can overcome his own terror is a hero and more.
Those that hope little cannot grow much.
I dare not say with Paul that I am the slave of Christ, but my highest aspiration and desire is to be the slave of Christ.
God chooses that men should be tried, but let a man beware of tempting his neighbor.
Where did you get your eyes so blue? Out of the sky as I came through.
The word doctrine, as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory.