What makes life dreary is the want of motive.
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life – to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
What are a handful of reasonable men against a crowd with stones in their hands?
Well, well, my boy, if good-luck knocks at your door, don’t you put your head out at window and tell it to be gone about its business, that’s all.
We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what we imagine might have been.
We hand folks over to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves.
We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.
We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.
We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.
Watch your own speech, and notice how it is guided by your less conscious purposes.