Nor did he narrow their play by looking only to the external forms of human relation.

To Diderot it came easily to act on a principle which most of us only accept in words: he looked not to what people said, nor even to what they did, but wholly to what they were.
Those whom he had once found reason to love and esteem might do him many an ill turn, without any fear of estranging him.

Any one can measure character by conduct.

It is a harder thing to be willing, in cases that touch our own interests, to interpret conduct by previous knowledge of character.

His father, for instance, might easily have spared money enough to save him from the harassing privations of Bohemian life in Paris.