On the contrary we have far too many of them--ignorant parents, silly parents, unwilling parents, undesirable parents--and those who aspire to the high dignity of creating the future race, let them be as few as they will--and perhaps at the present time the fewer the better--must not refuse the responsibilities of that position, its pains as well as its joys.
In our human world, as we know, the moral duties laid upon us--the duties in which, if we fail, we become outcasts in our own eyes or in those of others or in both--are of three kinds: the duties to oneself, the duties to the small circle of those we love, and the duties to the larger circle of mankind to which ultimately we belong, since out of it we proceed, and to it we owe all that we are.

There are no maxims, there is only an art and a difficult art, to harmonise duties which must often conflict.

We have to be true to all the motives that sanctify our lives.

To that extent George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver was undoubtedly right.

But the renunciation of the Self is not the routine solution of every conflict, any more than is the absolute failure to renounce.