The Way of All Flesh quotes

Against this there was no more to be said, and my sisters eyed me to silence.

Somehow or other my sisters always did eye me to silence when I differed from my father.

“Talk of his successful son,” snorted my father, whom I had fairly roused. “He is not fit to black his father’s boots.

These awful solitudes, this dread repose, Yon pyramid sublime of spotless snows, These spiry pinnacles, those smiling plains, This sea where one eternal winter reigns, These are thy works, and while on them I gaze I hear a silent tongue that speaks thy praise.

Some poets always begin to get groggy about the knees after running for seven or eight lines.

Mr. Pontifex’s last couplet gave him a lot of trouble, and nearly every word has been erased and rewritten once at least. In the visitors’ book at the Montanvert, however, he must have been obliged to commit himself definitely to one reading or another.

I wonder whether he would feel disposed to cry out before a real Michelangelo, if the critics had decided that it was not genuine, or before a reputed Michelangelo which was really by someone else.

But I suppose that a prig with more money than brains was much the same sixty or seventy years ago as he is now.

Look at Mendelssohn again about this same Tribune on which Mr. Pontifex felt so safe in staking his reputation as a man of taste and culture. He feels no less safe and writes, “I then went to the Tribune.

Trace a man’s career from his cradle to his grave and mark how Fortune has treated him. You will find that when he is once dead she can for the most part be vindicated from the charge of any but very superficial fickleness.

Her blindness is the merest fable; she can espy her favourites long before they are born.

We are as days and have had our parents for our yesterdays, but through all the fair weather of a clear parental sky the eye of Fortune can discern the coming storm, and she laughs as she places her favourites it may be in a …

Perhaps his main strength lay in the fact that though his capacity was a little above the average, it was not too much so. It is on this rock that so many clever people split.

The successful man will see just so much more than his neighbours as they will be able to see too when it is shown them, but not enough to puzzle them.

It is far safer to know too little than too much. People will condemn the one, though they will resent being called upon to exert themselves to follow the other.

It is on this rock that so many clever people split. The successful man will see just so much more than his neighbours as they will be able to see too when it is shown them, but not enough to puzzle them.

It is far safer to know too little than too much.

People will condemn the one, though they will resent being called upon to exert themselves to follow the other.

George Pontifex felt this as regards his children and his money.

His money was never naughty; his money never made noise or litter, and did not spill things on the tablecloth at meal times, or leave the door open when it went out.

His dividends did not quarrel among themselves, nor was he under any uneasiness lest his mortgages should become extravagant on reaching manhood and run him up debts which sooner or later he should have to pay.

We know so well what we are doing ourselves and why we do it, do we not?

I fancy that there is some truth in the view which is being put forward nowadays, that it is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.

His liver would not unfrequently get out of order, and he would come down to breakfast looking yellow about the eyes. Then the young people knew that they had better look out.

It is not as a general rule the eating of sour grapes that causes the children’s teeth to be set on edge.

Well-to-do parents seldom eat many sour grapes; the danger to the children lies in the parents eating too many sweet ones.

Then the young people knew that they had better look out. It is not as a general rule the eating of sour grapes that causes the children’s teeth to be set on edge.

Well-to-do parents seldom eat many sour grapes; the danger to the children lies in the parents eating too many sweet ones.

I grant that at first sight it seems very unjust, that the parents should have the fun and the children be punished for it, but young people should remember that for many years they were part and parcel of their parents and therefore had a …

the greater part of them sing and play as though they were on a moor in Scotland. So the absence of a genial mental atmosphere is not commonly recognised by children who have never known it.

Young people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.

Even if they are unhappy—very unhappy—it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness.

nor yet will they know how great a coward you are, nor how soon you will run away, if they fight you with persistency and judgement.

You keep the dice and throw them both for your children and yourself.

Load them then, for you can easily manage to stop your children from examining them. Tell them how singularly indulgent you are;

Some satirists have complained of life inasmuch as all the pleasures belong to the fore part of it and we must see them dwindle till we are left, it may be, with the miseries of a decrepit old age.

To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised season⁠—delightful if it happen to be a favoured one, but in practice very rarely favoured and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes.

Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised season—delightful if it happen to be a favoured one, but in practice very rarely favoured and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes.

Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

Fontenelle at the age of ninety, being asked what was the happiest time of his life, said he did not know that he had ever been much happier than he then was, but that perhaps his best years had been those when he was between …

If a new edition of the work is ever required I should like to introduce a few words insisting on the duty of seeking all reasonable pleasure and avoiding all pain that can be honourably avoided.

I should like to see children taught that they should not say they like things which they do not like, merely because certain other people say they like them, and how foolish it is to say they believe this or that when they understand nothing about it.

If it be urged that these additions would make the Catechism too long I would curtail the remarks upon our duty towards our neighbour and upon the sacraments.

Nevertheless it had got to be done, and poor Mrs. Allaby never looked at a young man without an eye to his being a future son-in-law. Papas and mammas sometimes ask young men whether their intentions are honourable towards their daughters.

I think young men might occasionally ask papas and mammas whether their intentions are honourable before they accept invitations to houses where there are still unmarried daughters.

“I can’t afford a curate, my dear,” said Mr. Allaby to his wife when the pair were discussing what was next to be done. “It will be better to get some young man to come and help me for a time upon a Sunday.

She dared not. Marry beneath her and be considered a disgrace to her family? She dared not. Remain at home and become an old maid and be laughed at? Not if she could help it. She did the only thing that could reasonably be expected.

She was drowning; Theobald might be only a straw, but she could catch at him and catch at him she accordingly did.

If the course of true love never runs smooth, the course of true matchmaking sometimes does so. The only ground for complaint in the present case was that it was rather slow. Theobald fell into the part assigned to him more easily than Mrs.

Not if she could help it. She did the only thing that could reasonably be expected. She was drowning; Theobald might be only a straw, but she could catch at him and catch at him she accordingly did.

If the course of true love never runs smooth, the course of true matchmaking sometimes does so.

The only ground for complaint in the present case was that it was rather slow. Theobald fell into the part assigned to him more easily than Mrs. Cowey and Mrs. Allaby had dared to hope. He was softened by Christina’s winning manners:

However much he may have disapproved of long engagements for other people, I doubt whether he had any particular objection to them in his own case.

A pair of lovers are like sunset and sunrise: there are such things every day but we very seldom see them.

Theobald posed as the most ardent lover imaginable, but, to use the vulgarism for the moment in fashion, it was all “side.” Christina was in love, as indeed she had been twenty times already.

Other people, and unfortunately by far the greater number of those who get married must be classed among the “other people,” will inevitably go through a quarter or half an hour of greater or less badness as the case may be.

Taking numbers into account, I should think more mental suffering had been undergone in the streets leading from St. George’s, Hanover Square, than in the condemned cells of Newgate.

There is no time at which what the Italians call la figlia della Morte lays her cold hand upon a man more awfully than during the first half hour that he is alone with a woman whom he has married but never genuinely loved.

at the end of that time, however, Theobald had rummaged up a conclusion from some odd corner of his soul to the effect that now he and Christina were married the sooner they fell into their future mutual relations the better.

If people who are in a difficulty will only do the first little reasonable thing which they can clearly recognise as reasonable, they will always find the next step more easy both to see and take.

What, then, thought Theobald, was here at this moment the first and most obvious matter to be considered, and what would be an equitable view of his and Christina’s relative positions in respect to it?

But he would buy Milton’s prose works and read his pamphlet on divorce. He might perhaps be able to get them at Newmarket.

So the bride sat crying in one corner of the carriage; and the bridegroom sulked in the other, and he feared her as only a bridegroom can fear.

Presently, however, a feeble voice was heard from the bride’s corner saying:

He was his own architect, and this saved expense; but architecture was not very well understood about the year 1834, when Theobald commenced operations, and the result is not as satisfactory as it would have been if he had waited a few years longer.

Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him.

I may very likely be condemning myself, all the time that I am writing this book, for I know that whether I like it or no I am portraying myself more surely than I am portraying any of the characters whom I set before the …

He believes her; he has a natural tendency to believe everything that is told him, and who should know the facts of the case better than his wife?

Poor fellow! He has done his best, but what does a fish’s best come to when the fish is out of water?

He has left meat and wine—that he can do; he will call again and will leave more meat and wine;

Why should the generations overlap one another at all?

Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account?

About a year and a half afterwards the tables were turned on Battersby—for Mrs. John Pontifex was safely delivered of a boy.

This much, however, we may say in the meantime, that having lived to be nearly seventy-three years old and died rich he must have been in very fair harmony with his surroundings.

I have heard it said sometimes that such and such a person’s life was a lie: but no man’s life can be a very bad lie; as long as it continues at all it is at worst nine-tenths of it true.

Mr. Pontifex’s life not only continued a long time, but was prosperous right up to the end. Is not this enough?

Is not this enough? Being in this world is it not our most obvious business to make the most of it—to observe what things do bona fide tend to long life and comfort, and to act accordingly?

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it⁠—and they do enjoy it as much as man and other circumstances will allow.

He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most; God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us. If Mr.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it—and they do enjoy it as much as man and other circumstances will allow.

He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most; God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.

If Mr. Pontifex is to be blamed it is for not having eaten and drunk less and thus suffered less from his liver, and lived perhaps a year or two longer.

A very high standard, again, involves the possession of rare virtues, and rare virtues are like rare plants or animals, things that have not been able to hold their own in the world.

A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner but more durable metal.

People divide off vice and virtue as though they were two things, neither of which had with it anything of the other. This is not so.

A reasonable virtue will give this chance its due value, neither more nor less.

Pleasure, after all, is a safer guide than either right or duty.

For hard as it is to know what gives us pleasure, right and duty are often still harder to distinguish and, if we go wrong with them, will lead us into just as sorry a plight as a mistaken opinion concerning pleasure.

The birth of his son opened Theobald’s eyes to a good deal which he had but faintly realised hitherto. He had had no idea how great a nuisance a baby was.

Babies come into the world so suddenly at the end, and upset everything so terribly when they do come: why cannot they steal in upon us with less of a shock to the domestic system?

His wife, too, did not recover rapidly from her confinement; she remained an invalid for months;

“

Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime.

A man at five and thirty should no more regret not having had a happier childhood than he should regret not having been born a prince of the blood.

Certainly it is a matter of common observation in England that the sons of clergymen are frequently unsatisfactory. The explanation is very simple, but is so often lost sight of that I may perhaps be pardoned for giving it here.

The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday.

Things must not be done in him which are venial in the weekday classes. He is paid for this business of leading a stricter life than other people. It is his raison d’être.

they were suffering from homesickness. They were starving, through being over-crammed with the wrong things. Nature came down upon them, but she did not come down on Theobald and Christina. Why should she? They were not leading a starved existence.

There are two classes of people in this world, those who sin, and those who are sinned against; if a man must belong to either, he had better belong to the first than to the second.

I may say in passing that Dr. Skinner had dabbled in a great many other things as well as chemistry.

He was a man of many small knowledges, and each of them dangerous.

I remember Alethea Pontifex once said in her wicked way to me, that Dr. Skinner put her in mind of the Bourbon princes on their return from exile after the battle of Waterloo, only that he was their exact converse;

still less did they hold out any hope of doing so within some more reasonable time. The deadness inherent in these defunct languages themselves had never been artificially counteracted by a system of bona fide rewards for application.

There had been any amount of punishments for want of application, but no good comfortable bribes had baited the hook which was to allure him to his good.

Indeed, the more pleasant side of learning to do this or that had always been treated as something with which Ernest had no concern. We had no business with pleasant things at all, at any rate very little business, at any rate not he, Ernest.

With what he did not like, however, it was different; the more he disliked a thing the greater the presumption that it was right.

It never occurred to him that the presumption was in favour of the rightness of what was most pleasant, and that the onus of proving that it was not right lay with those who disputed its being so.

I have said more than once that he believed in his own depravity; never was there a little mortal more ready to accept without cavil whatever he was told by those who were in authority over him:

She could have written if she had chosen, but she enjoyed seeing others write and encouraging them better than taking a more active part herself.

Perhaps literary people liked her all the better because she did not write.

I, as she very well knew, had always been devoted to her, and she might have had a score of other admirers if she had liked, but she had discouraged them all, and railed at matrimony as women seldom do unless they have a comfortable …

In religion she was, I should think, as nearly a freethinker as anyone could be whose mind seldom turned upon the subject.

She went to church, but disliked equally those who aired either religion or irreligion.

I remember once hearing her press a late well-known philosopher to write a novel instead of pursuing his attacks upon religion. The philosopher did not much like this, and dilated upon the importance of showing people the folly of much that they pretended to believe.

she had lived in London for the last twelve years, and naturally disliked the prospect of a small country town such as Roughborough. Was it a prudent thing to attempt so much? Must not people take their chances in this world?

Can anyone do much for anyone else unless by making a will in his favour and dying then and there?

Should not each look after his own happiness, and will not the world be best carried on if everyone minds his own business and leaves other people to mind theirs?

Was it a prudent thing to attempt so much? Must not people take their chances in this world? Can anyone do much for anyone else unless by making a will in his favour and dying then and there?

Should not each look after his own happiness, and will not the world be best carried on if everyone minds his own business and leaves other people to mind theirs?

Life is not a donkey race in which everyone is to ride his neighbour’s donkey and the last is to win, and the psalmist long since formulated a common experience when he declared that no man may deliver his brother nor make agreement unto God …

… very sweetest smiles and say she feared he was flattering her, on which he would rejoin with some pleasant little trifle about remarkable men (the remarkable man being for the moment Ernest) having invariably had remarkable women for their mothers—and so on and so on.

The advantage of doing one’s praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.

Theobald wrote Ernest a short and surly letter apropos of his aunt’s intentions in this matter.

Fortunately his temper had come to him from his mother, who, when not frightened, and when there was nothing on the horizon which might cross the slightest whim of her husband, was an amiable, good-natured woman.

If it was not such an awful thing to say of anyone, I should say that she meant well.

Ernest had also inherited his mother’s love of building castles in the air, and—so I suppose it must be called—her vanity. He was very fond of showing off, and, provided he could attract attention, cared little from whom it came, nor what it was for.

In vain both her lawyer and myself remonstrated with her on the unusual and hazardous nature of this arrangement.

We told her that sensible people will not take a more sanguine view concerning human nature than the Courts of Chancery do.

We said, in fact, everything that anyone else would say. She admitted everything, but urged that her time was short, that nothing would induce her to leave her money to her nephew in the usual way.

… and now, as he lay on the grass, speeches, some one or other of which was as certain to come as the sun to set, kept running in his head till they confuted the idea of telling the truth by reducing it to an absurdity.

Truth might be heroic, but it was not within the range of practical domestic politics.

Having settled then that he was to tell a lie, what lie should he tell? Should he say he had been robbed? He had enough imagination to know that he had not enough imagination to carry him out here.

Having settled then that he was to tell a lie, what lie should he tell? Should he say he had been robbed? He had enough imagination to know that he had not enough imagination to carry him out here.

Young as he was, his instinct told him that the best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way⁠—who husbands it too carefully to waste it where it can be dispensed with.

The simplest course would be to say that he had lost the watch, and was late for dinner because he had been looking for it.

The boy went mechanically to the sofa.

Whenever his mother wanted what she called a confidential talk with him she always selected the sofa as the most suitable ground on which to open her campaign. All mothers do this; the sofa is to them what the dining-room is to fathers.

In the present case the sofa was particularly well adapted for a strategic purpose, being an old-fashioned one with a high back, mattress, bolsters and cushions.

Ernest used to have to recite a hymn about conscience. It was to the effect that if you did not pay attention to its voice it would soon leave off speaking.

“My mamma’s conscience has not left off speaking,” said Ernest to one of his chums at Roughborough; “it’s always jabbering.”

When a boy has once spoken so disrespectfully as this about his mother’s conscience it is practically all over between him and her.

Long before Ernest reached the dining-room his ill-divining soul had told him that his sin had found him out.

What head of a family ever sends for any of its members into the dining-room if his intentions are honourable?

When he reached it he found it empty—his father having been called away for a few minutes unexpectedly upon some parish business—and he was left in the same kind of suspense as people are in after they have been ushered into their dentist’s anteroom.

“Call that not much indeed,” laughed Ernest, as I read him what I have just written. “Why it is the whole duty of a father, but it is the mystery-making which is the worst evil.

If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence.

”

Some people say that their school days were the happiest of their lives. They may be right, but I always look with suspicion upon those whom I hear saying this.

It is hard enough to know whether one is happy or unhappy now, and still harder to compare the relative happiness or unhappiness of different times of one’s life; the utmost that can be said is that we are fairly happy so long as we are not distinctly aware of being miserable.

As I was talking with Ernest one day not so long since about this, he said he was so happy now that he was sure he had never been happier, and did not wish to be so, but that Cambridge was the first place where …

… not so long since about this, he said he was so happy now that he was sure he had never been happier, and did not wish to be so, but that Cambridge was the first place where he had ever been consciously and continuously happy.

How can any boy fail to feel an ecstasy of pleasure on first finding himself in rooms which he knows for the next few years are to be his castle?

Here he will not be compelled to turn out of the most comfortable place as soon as he has ensconced himself in it because papa or mamma happens to come into the room, and he should give it up to them.

He did not understand that if he waited and listened and observed, another idea of some kind would probably occur to him some day, and that the development of this would in its turn suggest still further ones.

He did not yet know that the very worst way of getting hold of ideas is to go hunting expressly after them.

The way to get them is to study something of which one is fond, and to note down whatever crosses one’s mind in reference to it, either during study or relaxation, in a little notebook kept always in the waistcoat pocket.

Nor yet did he know that ideas, no less than the living beings in whose minds they arise, must be begotten by parents not very unlike themselves, the most original still differing but slightly from the parents that have given rise to them.

Life is like a fugue, everything must grow out of the subject and there must be nothing new.

Nor, again, did he see how hard it is to say where one idea ends and another begins, nor yet how closely this is paralleled in the difficulty of saying where a life begins or ends, or an action or indeed anything, there being an …

… visit, and was therefore pleased that Theobald should behave so well, but at the same time he stood so much in need of moral support that it was painful to him to see one of his own familiar friends go over to the enemy’s camp.

For no matter how well we may know a thing⁠—how clearly we may see a certain patch of colour, for example, as red, it shakes us and knocks us about to find another see it, or be more than half inclined to see it, as green.

Theobald had generally begun to get a little impatient before the end of the visit, but the impression formed during the earlier part was the one which the visitor had carried away with him. Theobald never discussed any of the boys with Ernest.

The worst of it was that she had so often proved to be right.

Boys and young men are violent in their affections, but they are seldom very constant; it is not till they get older that they really know the kind of friend they want; in their earlier essays young men are simply learning to judge character.

Ernest had been no exception to the general rule.

She was supposed to be very clever.

All young ladies are either very pretty or very clever or very sweet; they may take their choice as to which category they will go in for, but go in for one of the three they must.

It was hopeless to try and pass Charlotte off as either pretty or sweet. So she became clever as the only remaining alternative.

These reflections satisfied Ernest that on the whole he had better smoke, so he sneaked to his portmanteau and brought out his pipes and tobacco again.

There should be moderation he felt in all things, even in virtue; so for that night he smoked immoderately.

It was a pity, however, that he had bragged to Dawson about giving up smoking. The pipes had better be kept in a cupboard for a week or two, till in other and easier respects Ernest should have proved his steadfastness.

… of change consequent upon his becoming suddenly religious, being ordained and leaving Cambridge, had been too much for my hero, and had for the time thrown him off an equilibrium which was yet little supported by experience, and therefore as a matter of course unstable.

Everyone has a mass of bad work in him which he will have to work off and get rid of before he can do better⁠—and indeed, the more lasting a man’s ultimate good work is, the more sure he is to pass through a time, and perhaps a very long one, in which there seems very little hope for him at all.

We must all sow our spiritual wild oats. The fault I feel personally disposed to find with my godson is not that he had wild oats to sow, but that they were such an exceedingly tame and uninteresting crop.

… get rid of before he can do better—and indeed, the more lasting a man’s ultimate good work is, the more sure he is to pass through a time, and perhaps a very long one, in which there seems very little hope for him at all.

We must all sow our spiritual wild oats.

The fault I feel personally disposed to find with my godson is not that he had wild oats to sow, but that they were such an exceedingly tame and uninteresting crop.

but there was no Mr. Hawke at hand, so Pryer had everything his own way.

Embryo minds, like embryo bodies, pass through a number of strange metamorphoses before they adopt their final shape.

It is no more to be wondered at that one who is going to turn out a Roman Catholic, should have passed through the stages of being first a Methodist, and then a free thinker, than that a man should at some former time have …

Ernest, however, could not be expected to know this; embryos never do.

Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition which really suits them.

This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death.

Why did he see in a moment that it was a bad one now, though he had been unable to see it when he had taken it from Pryer?

Of course some poor people were very nice, and always would be so, but as though scales had fallen suddenly from his eyes he saw that no one was nicer for being poor, and that between the upper and lower classes there was a gulf which amounted practically to an impassable barrier.

That evening he reflected a good deal.

Whoever plots the sin, thou ’point’st the season; ’Tis thou that spurn’st at right, at law, at reason; And in thy shady cell, where none may spy him, Sits Sin, to seize the souls that wander by him.”

If the guilt of opportunity is great, how much greater is the guilt of that which is believed to be opportunity, but in reality is no opportunity at all.

If the better part of valour is discretion, how much more is not discretion the better part of vice.

If the guilt of opportunity is great, how much greater is the guilt of that which is believed to be opportunity, but in reality is no opportunity at all.

If the better part of valour is discretion, how much more is not discretion the better part of vice.

About ten minutes after we last saw Ernest, a scared, insulted girl, flushed and trembling, was seen hurrying from Mrs. Jupp’s house as fast as her agitated state would let her, and in another ten minutes two policemen were seen also coming out of Mrs.

The only excuse I can make for him is that he was very young—not yet four and twenty—and that in mind as in body, like most of those who in the end come to think for themselves, he was a slow grower.

By far the greater part, moreover, of his education had been an attempt, not so much to keep him in blinkers as to gouge his eyes out altogether.

But to return to my story. It transpired afterwards that Miss Maitland had had no intention of giving Ernest in charge when she ran out of Mrs. Jupp’s house.

It puzzled him, however, that he should not have known how much he had hated being a clergyman till now. He knew that he did not particularly like it, but if anyone had asked him whether he actually hated it, he would have answered no.

I suppose people almost always want something external to themselves, to reveal to them their own likes and dislikes.

Our most assured likings have for the most part been arrived at neither by introspection nor by any process of conscious reasoning, but by the bounding forth of the heart to welcome the gospel proclaimed to it by another.

He knew that he did not particularly like it, but if anyone had asked him whether he actually hated it, he would have answered no. I suppose people almost always want something external to themselves, to reveal to them their own likes and dislikes.

Our most assured likings have for the most part been arrived at neither by introspection nor by any process of conscious reasoning, but by the bounding forth of the heart to welcome the gospel proclaimed to it by another.

We hear some say that such and such a thing is thus or thus, and in a moment the train that has been laid within us, but whose presence we knew not, flashes into consciousness and perception.

“If you like it,” said I, “I will say all your family are horrid except yourself and your aunt Alethea.

The greater part of every family is always odious; if there are one or two good ones in a very large family, it is as much as can be expected.

”

… in spite of all that had happened, and above all else he cherished the hope that he might know how to seize it if it came, for whatever it was it would be something that no one else could do so well as he could.

People said there were no dragons and giants for adventurous men to fight with nowadays; it was beginning to dawn upon him that there were just as many now as at any past time.

Monstrous as such a faith may seem in one who was qualifying himself for a high mission by a term of imprisonment, he could no more help it than he could help breathing;

This letter did not produce the effect on Ernest that it would have done before his imprisonment began. His father and mother thought they could take him up as they had left him off.

They forgot the rapidity with which development follows misfortune, if the sufferer is young and of a sound temperament.

Ernest made no reply to his father’s letter, but his desire for a total break developed into something like a passion. “There are orphanages,” he exclaimed to himself, “for children who have lost their parents—oh!

He who takes the highest and most self-respecting view of his own welfare which it is in his power to conceive, and adheres to it in spite of conventionality, is a Christian whether he knows it and calls himself one, or whether he does not.

A rose is not the less a rose because it does not know its own name.

What if circumstances had made his duty more easy for him than it would be to most men? That was his luck, as much as it is other people’s luck to have other duties made easy for them by accident of birth.

… out a very good case, but whichever may be right surely Ernest had as much right to the good luck of finding a duty made easier as he had had to the bad fortune of falling into the scrape which had got him into prison.

A man is not to be sneered at for having a trump card in his hand; he is only to be sneered at if he plays his trump card badly.

Indeed, I question whether it is ever much harder for anyone to give up father and mother for Christ’s sake than it was for Ernest. The relations between the parties will have almost always been severely strained before it comes to this.

Then he saw also that it matters little what profession, whether of religion or irreligion, a man may make, provided only he follows it out with charitable inconsistency, and without insisting on it to the bitter end.

It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or want of dogma that the danger lies.

This was the crowning point of the edifice; when he had got here he no longer wished to molest even the Pope.

in other lives there is great strain, but there is also great fusing and accommodating power; in others great strain with little accommodating power.

A life will be successful or not according as the power of accommodation is equal to or unequal to the strain of fusing and adjusting internal and external changes.

The trouble is that in the end we shall be driven to admit the unity of the universe so completely as to be compelled to deny that there is either an external or an internal, but must see everything both as external and internal at …

This is illogical, but extremes are alone logical, and they are always absurd, the mean is alone practicable and it is always illogical.

It is faith and not logic which is the supreme arbiter.

They say all roads lead to Rome, and all philosophies that I have ever seen lead ultimately either to some gross absurdity, or else to the conclusion already more than once insisted on in these pages, that the just shall live by faith, that is …

… towards him in throwing in his way the very person of all others whom he was most glad to see, and whom, of all others, in spite of her living so near him, he might have never fallen in with but for a happy accident.

When people get it into their heads that they are being specially favoured by the Almighty, they had better as a general rule mind their p’s and q’s, and when they think they see the devil’s drift with more special clearness, let them remember that he has had much more experience than they have, and is probably meditating mischief.

Already during supper the thought that in Ellen at last he had found a woman whom he could love well enough to wish to live with and marry had flitted across his mind, and the more they had chatted the more reasons kept suggesting themselves …

But they seldom have fair play; as a general rule they meet with foul play, and foul play from those who live by selling them stones made into a great variety of shapes and sizes so as to form a tolerable imitation of bread.

Some are lucky enough to meet with few obstacles, some are plucky enough to override them, but in the greater number of cases, if people are saved at all they are saved so as by fire.

While Ernest was with me Ellen was looking out for a shop on the south side of the Thames near the Elephant and Castle, which was then almost a new and a very rising neighbourhood.

Then I was taken to see the shop.

An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed.

Decay sets in at once in every part of it, and what mould and wind and weather would spare, street boys commonly destroy. Ernest’s shop in its untenanted state was a dirty unsavoury place enough.

If a man carries with him a little sketch book and is continually jotting down sketches, he has the artistic instinct; a hundred things may hinder his due development, but the instinct is there.

The literary instinct may be known by a man’s keeping a small notebook in his waistcoat pocket, into which he jots down anything that strikes him, or any good thing that he hears said, or a reference to any passage which he thinks will come in useful to him.

Ernest had such a notebook always with him. Even when he was at Cambridge he had begun the practice without anyone’s having suggested it to him.

“You are stirring mud,” said I, “or poking at a sleeping dog.

You are trying to make people resume consciousness about things, which, with sensible men, have already passed into the unconscious stage.

The men whom you would disturb are in front of you, and not, as you fancy, behind you; it is you who are the lagger, not they.”

Having found out that no system based on absolute certainty was possible he was contented.

I had only a very vague idea who Bishop Berkeley was, but was thankful to him for having defended us from an incontrovertible first premise.

I am afraid I said a few words implying that after a great deal of trouble he had arrived at the conclusion which sensible people reach without bothering their brains so much.

Ernest and I had been growing apart for some time. I was vexed at his having married, and he knew I was vexed, though I did my best to hide it.

A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage⁠—but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.

The rift in friendship which invariably makes its appearance on the marriage of either of the parties to it was fast widening, as it no less invariably does, into the great gulf which is fixed between the married and the unmarried, and I was beginning …

As soon as I found that he no longer liked his wife I forgave him at once, and was as much interested in him as ever.

There is nothing an old bachelor likes better than to find a young married man who wishes he had not got married⁠—especially when the case is such an extreme one that he need not pretend to hope that matters will come all right again, or encourage his young friend to make the best of it.

I was myself in favour of a separation, and said I would make Ellen an allowance myself—of course intending that it should come out of Ernest’s money; but he would not hear of this.

but I did not like the notion of his coming suddenly from the position of a small shopkeeper to that of a man with an income of between three and four thousand a year.

Too sudden a jump from bad fortune to good is just as dangerous as one from good to bad; besides, poverty is very wearing; it is a quasi-embryonic condition, through which a man had better pass if he is to hold his later developments securely, but like measles or scarlet fever he had better have it mildly and get it over early.

No man is safe from losing every penny he has in the world, unless he has had his facer. How often do I not hear middle-aged women and quiet family men say that they have no speculative tendency;

… in spite of all his natural caution, and his well knowing how foolish speculation is, yet there are some investments which are called speculative but in reality are not so, and he will pull out of his pocket the prospectus of a Cornish gold mine.

It is only on having actually lost money that one realises what an awful thing the loss of it is, and finds out how easily it is lost by those who venture out of the middle of the most beaten path.

Ernest had had his facer, as he had had his attack of poverty, young, and sufficiently badly for a sensible man to be little likely to forget it.

“

A man first quarrels with his father about three-quarters of a year before he is born.

It is then he insists on setting up a separate establishment; when this has been once agreed to, the more complete the separation forever after the better for both.” Then he said more seriously:

“Cross him,” said the doctor, “at once. Crossing is the great medical discovery of the age.

Shake him out of himself by shaking something else into him.

”

“I have found the Zoological Gardens of service to many of my patients.

I should prescribe for Mr. Pontifex a course of the larger mammals.

Don’t let him think he is taking them medicinally, but let him go to their house twice a week for a fortnight, and stay with the hippopotamus, the rhinoceros, and the elephants, till they begin to bore him.

He fought against this for a time, but in the end consoled himself by saying it was so nice to have so much pleasure that he could afford to throw a lot of it away.

Having found a theory on which to justify himself, he slept in peace.

At Marseilles we rested, and there the excitement of the change proved, as I had half feared it would, too much for my godson’s still enfeebled state. For a few days he was really ill, but after this he righted.

Of course it would, but we would not take it though it were offered us.

No matter what evil may befall us, we will mostly abide by it and see it out.

I could see that Ernest felt much as I had felt myself. He said little, but noted everything. Once only did he frighten me.

“That was all very well then,” he thought to himself, “when the grapes were beyond my reach, but now it is different.”

Besides, who but a prig would set himself high aims, or make high resolves at all?

Some of his old friends, on learning that he had got rid of his supposed wife and was now comfortably off again, wanted to renew their acquaintance;

The more I see the more sure I am that it does not matter why people do the right thing so long only as they do it, nor why they may have done the wrong if they have done it.

The result depends upon the thing done and the motive goes for nothing.

I have read somewhere, but cannot remember where, that in some country district there was once a great scarcity of food, during which the poor suffered acutely; many indeed actually died of starvation, and all were hard put to it.

But surely he would not have got the increased moral power if he could have helped it, and he will not knowingly alight upon another cup of hot coffee.

The more I see the more sure I am that it does not matter why people do the right thing so long only as they do it, nor why they may have done the wrong if they have done it.

The result depends upon the thing done and the motive goes for nothing. I have read somewhere, but cannot remember where, that in some country district there was once a great scarcity of food, during which the poor suffered acutely;

I laughed at this but let him alone. He tried and tried very hard for a long while, but I need hardly say was unsuccessful.

The older I grow, the more convinced I become of the folly and credulity of the public; but at the same time the harder do I see it is to impose oneself upon that folly and credulity.

He tried editor after editor with article after article. Sometimes an editor listened to him and told him to leave his articles;

I want to live long and to raise my children, if I see they would be happier for the raising; that is what I want, and it is not what I am doing now that will help me.

Being a gentleman is a luxury which I cannot afford, therefore I do not want it.

Let me go back to my shop again, and do things for people which they want done and will pay me for doing for them. They know what they want and what is good for them better than I can tell them.”

This was the picture of which one of the servants had said that it must be good, for Mr. Pontifex had given ten shillings for the frame.

The paper on the walls was unchanged; the roses were still waiting for the bees; and the whole family still prayed night and morning to be made “truly honest and conscientious.”

One picture only was removed—a photograph of himself which had hung under one of his father and between those of his brother and sister.

The Theobalds, who do what they do because it seems to be the correct thing, but who in their hearts neither like it nor believe in it, are in reality the least dangerous of all classes to the peace and liberties of mankind.

The man to fear is he who goes at things with the cocksureness of pushing vulgarity and self-conceit.

These are not vices which can be justly laid to the charge of the English clergy.

I am an Ishmael by instinct as much as by accident of circumstances, but if I keep out of society I shall be less vulnerable than Ishmaels generally are.

The moment a man goes into society, he becomes vulnerable all round.

”

“Well,” he continued, “there are a lot of things that want saying which no one dares to say, a lot of shams which want attacking, and yet no one attacks them.

It seems to me that I can say things which not another man in England except myself will venture to say, and yet which are crying to be said.

”

they are the practical authorities on the question—What is best for man? and I should like to see them and find out what they do.

Let us settle the fact first and fight about the moral tendencies afterwards.

”