To kindle sympathy your personage must be interesting; must touch our pity or wonder or energetic fellow-feeling or sense of moral loveliness, which is a very different thing from touching our mere sense of the distinctions between right and wrong.

Direct homily excites no sympathy with the homilist.
Deep pensive meditations on the moral puzzles of the world are not at all like didactic discourse.

But the Father of the Family was exactly fulfilling Diderot's notion of dramatic purpose and utility when he talked to his daughter in such a strain as this: "Marriage, my daughter, is a vocation imposed by nature....

He who counts on bliss without alloy knows neither the life of man nor the designs of heaven.

If marriage exposes us to cruel pain, it is also the source of the sweetest pleasures.