If we had a keen vision and feeling it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of the roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavours and the tinglings of a merited shame.

How could a man be satisfied with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances? No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he's chosen from among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him. . .

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

A difference of tastes in jokes is a great strain on the affections.