“We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence.”

“What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.”

“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.”

“It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own.”

“It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it—if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy—the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love.”

“Strange, that some of us, with quick alternative vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.”

“For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.”