'Believe only half of what you see, and nothing that you hear,' is a cynical saying, and yet less bitter than at first appears. It does not argue that human nature is false, but simply that it is human nature. How can any fallible human being with two eyes, two ears, one judgment, and one brain - all more or less limited in their apprehensions of things external, and biased by a thousand internal impressions, purely individual - how can we possibly decide on even the plainest actions of another, to say nothing of the words, which may have gone through half-a-dozen different translations and modifications, or the motives, which can only be known to the Omniscient Himself? ~ Ch. 8

Let every one of us cultivate, in every word that issues from our mouth, absolute truth. I say cultivate, because to very few people - as may be noticed of mos…

Do your neighbour good by all means in your power, moral as well as physical - by kindness, by patience, by unflinching resistance against every outward evil -…

Gossip, public, private, social - to fight against it either by word or pen seems, after all, like fighting with shadows. Everybody laughs at it, protests agai…

Die Erinnerung wirkt wie das Sammlungsglas in der Camera obscura: Sie zieht alles zusammen und bringt dadurch ein viel schoneres Bild hervor, als sein Original…

:it is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human understanding to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives:

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.