Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name . … Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.
There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.
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.
I have nothing to tell except travellers’ stories, which are always tiresome, like the description of a play which was very exciting to those who saw it.
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.
