26～30

26.The only useful knowledge is that which teaches us how to seek what is good and avoid what is evil; in short, how to increase the sum of human happiness. This is the great end: it may be well or ill pursued, but that knowledge can be an enemy to happiness is to say that men will enjoy less happiness, when they know how to seek it, than when they do not. This reasoning is on a par with that of any one who should refuse when asked to point out the road to York, saying that this inquirer would have a much better chance of reaching York without direction than with it.
This = how to increase the sum of human happiness. great end

 
27.How strange it was that the creative instinct should seize upon this dull stockbroker, to his own ruin, perhaps; and to the misfortune of such were dependent on him, and yet no stranger than the way in which the spirit of God has seized men, powerful and rich, pursuing them with stubborn vigilance till at last, conquered, they have abandoned the joy of the world and the love of women for the painful austerities of the cloister.

 
28.Of him they took but little notice. He might have been a log of wood lying there at Miss Barrett's feet for all the attention Mr. Browning paid him. Sometimes he scrubbed his head in a brisk, spasmodic way, energetically, without sentiment, as he passed him. Whatever that scrub might mean, Flush felt nothing but an intense dislike for Mr. Browning. The very sight of him set his teeth on edge. Oh! to let them meet sharply, completely in the stuff of his trousers! And yet he dared not.

 
29.It always is wretched weather, according to us. The weather is like the Government, always in the wrong. If it is fine, we say the country is being ruined for want of rain; if it does rain, we pray for fine weather: If December passes without snow, we indignantly demand to know what has become of our good old-fashioned winters, and talk as if we had been cheated out of something we had bought and paid for; and when it does snow, our language is a disgrace to a Christian nation. We shall never be content until each man makes his own weather, and keeps it to himself.

 
30.There is, I am told, no greater happiness known on earth than that of a father who, after a party to which his children's school friends have been invited, can lie back in his chair and tell himself that he did not behave so badly after all. It is always pleasant to pass an examination, but there is no examination which it is a more blessed relief to pass than an examination by one's children's friends. Fathers have told me of the nervousness they have seen in their children on such occasions—of the impatient expression they have observed on the little face that, at a joke that has no point, tells them of the silent soliloquy: “Daddy being silly again!"