Just like I did with Main Street, I feel like doing a whole post of The Way of All Flesh quotes.
"Your question shows me that you have never read your Bible. A more unreliable book was never put upon paper. Take my advice and don't read it, not till you are a few years older, and may do so safely."
"But surely you believe the Bible when it tells you of such things as that Christ died and rose from the dead? Surely you believe this?" said Ernest, quite prepared to be told that Pryer believed nothing of the kind.
"I do not believe it, I know it."
"But how--if the testimony of the Bible fails?"
"On that of the living voice of the Church, which I know to be infallible and to be informed of Christ himself."
"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 been a mere cell, and later on an invertebrate animal. Ernest, however, could not be expected to know this; embryos never do."
"He had fallen, as I have shown, among a gang of spiritual thieves or coiners, who passed the basest metal upon him without his finding it out, so childish and inexperienced was he in the ways of anything but those back eddies of the world, schools and universities. Among the bad threepenny pieces which had been passed off upon him, and which he kept for small hourly disbursement, was a remark that poor people were much nicer than the richer and better behaved."
A letter from his father: "My dear Ernest, My object in writing is not to upbraid you with the disgrace and shame you have inflicted upon your mother and myself, to say nothing of your brother Joey, and your sister..."
"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 to say that sensible people will get through life by rule of thumb as they may interpret it most conveniently without asking too many questions for conscience' sake."
"Nevertheless, what he wanted was in reality so easily to be found that it took a highly educated scholar like himself to be unable to find it."
"If Universities were not the worst teachers in the world I should like to see professorships of speculation established at Oxford and Cambridge. When I reflect, however, that the only things worth doing which Oxford and Cambridge can do well are cooking, cricket, rowing and games, of which there is no professorship, I fear that the establishment of a professorial chair would end in teaching young men neither how to speculate, nor how not to speculate, but would simply turn them out as bad speculators."
A doctor: "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. I find these beasts do my patients more good than any others. The monkeys are not a wide enough cross; they do not stimulate sufficiently. The larger carnivora are unsympathetic. The reptiles are worse than useless, and the marsupials are not much better. Birds again, except parrots, are not very beneficial; he may look at them now and again, but with the elephants and the pig tribe generally he should mix just now as freely as possible."
"This was the course things had taken in the Church of England during the last forty years [the mid-19th century]. The set has been steadily in one direction. A few men who knew what they wanted made cats' paws of the Christmas and the Charlottes, and the Christmas and the Charlottes made cats' paws of the Mrs. Goodhews, and the old Miss Wrights, and Mrs. Goodhews and old Miss Wrights told the Mr. Goodhews and young Miss Wrights what they should do, and when the Mr. Goodhews and the young Miss Wrights did it the little Goodhews and the rest of the spiritual flock did as they did, and the Theobalds went for nothing; step by step, day by day, year by year, parish by parish, diocese by diocese this was how it was done. And yet the Church of England looks with no friendly eyes upon the theory of Evolution or Descent with Modification."
On a sister's letters: "I daresay she writes very well, but she has fallen under the dominion of the words 'hope,' 'think,' 'feel,' 'try,' 'bright,' and 'little,' and can hardly write a page without introducing all these words and some of them more than once. All this has the effect of making her style monotonous."
