Take hope from the heart of man and you make him a beast of prey.

It is a kind of blindness – poverty. We can only grope through life when we are poor, hitting and maiming ourselves against every angle.

Experience is an excellent spyglass; but it has this drawback, that Prejudice very often clouds the lens.

What is failure except feebleness? And what is it to miss one’s mark except to aim widely and weakly?

In a few generations more, there will probably be no room at all allowed for animals on the earth: no need of them, no toleration of them. An immense agony will have then ceased, but with it there will also have passed away the last smile of the world’s youth.

There is no more terrible woe upon earth than the woe of the stricken brain, which remembers the days of its strength, the living light of its reason, the sunrise of its proud intelligence, and knows that these have passed away like a tale that is told...

Whatever good I have kept in me – and in the world it is very hard to keep any – I owe it to Ben on those still Sunday mornings in those deep, old, quiet, green woods.

It is hard work to be good when you are very little and very hungry, and have many sticks to beat you, and no mother’s lips to kiss you.

A pipe is a pocket philosopher, – a truer one than Socrates, for it never asks questions. Socrates must have been very tiresome, when one thinks of it.

Coleridge cried; “O God, how glorious it is to live!” Renan asks, “O God, when will it be worth while to live?” In Nature we echo the poet; in the world we echo the thinker.