Oh, how desperately bored, in spite of their grim determination to have a Good Time, the majority of pleasure-seekers really are!

The inconveniences and horrors of the pox are perfectly well known to every one; but still the disease flourishes and spreads. Several million people were killed in a recent war and half the world ruined; but we all busily go on in courses that make another event of the same sort inevitable. Experientia docet? Experientia doesn't.

Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction.

For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.

which is better - to be born stupid into an intelligent society or intelligent into an insane one?

If you want to write, keep cats.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.