“Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.”

“You know I have duties──we both have duties──before which feeling must be sacrificed.”

“If we only look far enough off for the consequence of our actions, we can always find some point in the combination of results by which those actions can be justified: by adopting the point of view of a Providence who arranges results, or of a philosopher who traces them, we shall find it possible to obtain perfect complacency in choosing to do what is most agreeable to us in the present moment.”

“Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; theyknow all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.”

“Because, dear, trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing; the people we love are taken from us, and we can joy in nothing because they are not with us; sickness comes, and we faint under the burden of our feeble bodies; we go astray and do wrong, and bring ourselves into trouble with our fellow men. There is no man or woman born into this world to whom some of these trials do not fall, and so I feel that some of them must happen to you; and I desire for you, that while you are young you should seek for the strength from your Heavenly Father, that you may have a support which will not fail you in the evil day.”

“Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotions.”

“Men can do nothing without the make-believe of abeginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to startwith a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars'unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that timeis at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always beenunderstood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appearsthat her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science,too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit intobillions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets offin medias res. No retrospect will take us to the truebeginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it isbut a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our storysets out.”