“Here is the indictment of the good Lord Hastings;Which in a set hand fairly is engross'dThat it may be to-day read o'er in Paul's.And mark how well the sequel hangs together:Eleven hours I have spent to write it over,For yesternight by Catesby was it sent me;The precedent was full as long a-doing;And yet within these five hours Hastings liv'd,Untainted, unexamin'd, free, at liberty.Here's a good world the while! Who is so grosThat cannot see this palpable device?Yet who's so bold but says he sees it not?Bad is the world; and all will come to nought,When such ill dealing must be seen in thought.”

“The hours must be endured and those who cannot do so in life will most surely do so in death. You say you cannot face them? Life’s joys and pains both? You shall find them waiting for you, a world of ignored moments there to be explored. Then shall you know how long an hour can be, shall feel the awful depth and restlessness of even a single day, and all the days you fled from life while you were alive.”

“Farslayer howls across the worldFor thy heart! For thy heart! who hast wronged me,Vengeance is his who casts the Blade,Yet he will, in the end, no triumph see.”

“A man must have a good deal of vanity who believes, and a good deal of boldness who affirms, that all the doctrines he holds are true, and all he rejects are false.”

“Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented…. In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”

“That is the purpose for which you are called hither. Called, is say, though I have not called you to me, strangers from distant lands. You have come and are here met, in this very nick of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is so ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, must now find counsel for the peril of the world.”