“It is the history of our kindnesses that alone make this world tolerable. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters . . . I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.”

“To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.”

“To be honest, to be kind - to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends but these without capitulation - above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself - here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful.”

“But he had an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove. 'I incline to Cain's heresy,' he used to say quaintly: 'I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.”

“The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties.Help us to play the man,Help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces,Let cheerfulness abound with industry.Give us to go blithely on our business all this day,Bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonoured,And grant us in the end the gift of sleep.”

“Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.”

“What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps a-field.”