To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.

Children are remarkable for their intelligence and ardor, for their curiosity, their intolerance of shams, the clarity and ruthlessness of their vision.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Being cared for when one is dead is less satisfactory than being cared for when one is alive.

Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.

Indifference to all the refinements of life--it's really shocking. Just Calvinism, that's all. Calvinism without the excuse of Calvin's theology.

...wordless conditioning is crude and wholesale; cannot bring home the finer distinctions, cannot inculcate the more complex courses of behavior. For that there must be words, but words without reason... Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, encrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.