You want to find out a mode of renunciation that will be an escape from pain. I tell you again, there is no such escape possible except by perverting or mutilating one's nature. What would become of me, if I tried to escape pain? Scorn and cynicism would be my only opium; unless I could fall into some kind of conceited madness, and fancy myself a favourite of Heaven because I am not a favourite with men.

No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.

Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life—the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it—can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children again, and demand an active will to wreak our vengeance on.

Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state. Suffering can be likened to a baptism - the passing over the threshold of pain and grief and anguish to claim a new state of being.

There are glances of hatred that stab, and raise no cry of murder.