We have had an unspeakably delightful journey, one of those journeys which seem to divide one’s life in two, by the new ideas they suggest and the new views of interest they open.
there are two ways of speaking an audience will always like: one is, to tell them what they don’t understand; and the other is, to tell them what they’re used to.
Character is not cut in marble – it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past-sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.
Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.
Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.
