Why was I born with such contemporaries?

something was dead in each of us,
and what was dead was hope.

When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.

When I think of all the harm the Bible has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it

Every impulse we strangle will only poison us.

The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman's heart.