The sun is setting in crimson, delicate blue and green. I think of the earth as a revolving ball. ‘This was the Creator’s design, or, if we prefer so to speak, this was the law, that there should be a ball and that it should turn on its axis. But just as surely was it the design or law that there should be these colours, crimson, blue, and green, and that I should be affected by them. This affection was rolled up in the primal impulse which started the planet and is as necessary as its revolution.
Zeal in proselytising is often due to an uneasy suspicion that we only half-believe.
We should take pains to be polite to those whom we love. Politeness preserves love, is a kind of sheath to it.
The hornbeam hedge is coming into leaf in patches although all parts of each side face the same point of the compass. The leaves of some patches are fully expanded, while in others they are only in bud. The dry, brown, dead leaves of last year have remained through the winter and early spring, but they are dropping off now that the new leaves begin to shoot.
We ought not to expect every child to be religious. The religious temper is an endowment like that for painting or poetry.
A. and B. meet on the road. B. is a retired official and has nothing to do.
B. ‘Meant to have come to see you several times’ (has not called for nine months), ‘but I have so many engagements.’ (Shows a basket.) ‘Look here, just had to take some eggs to C. for my wife.’
‘If a man turns to Christ, nothing in him is to be left behind. Every passion must be brought to Him to be transformed by Him. Otherwise the man does not come, but only a part of him.’ [Said to me years ago by a pious friend now dead.]
The real proportion between vice and virtue in a man is often misjudged because the vice is before us continually, while the virtue does not obtrude.
If you are to live in happiness and peace with the woman you love, you must not permit the daily course of life to have its way unchecked. There must be hours of removal to a distance when in silence you create anew her ideal and proper form, when you think of her as sculptured in white marble.