If you wish at once to do nothing and be respectable nowadays, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study.

- Leslie Stephen

Chance is a name for our ignorance.

- Leslie Stephen

Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is doing a public service.

- Leslie Stephen

Genius is a capacity for taking trouble.

- Leslie Stephen

The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact.

- Leslie Stephen

The truth cannot be asserted without denouncing the falsehood.

- Leslie Stephen

The poet should touch our heart by showing his own

- Leslie Stephen

When I ceased to accept the teaching of my youth, it was not so much a process of giving up beliefs, as of discovering that I had never really believ…

- Leslie Stephen

Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season.

- Leslie Stephen