Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.

...two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.

It isn't a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

The snapshots had become almost as dim as memories.

The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.

For particulars, as everyone knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fretsawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.