Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.

And what strange voices they have! Sometimes like the complaining of small children; sometimes like the noise of lambs.

The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realization of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world, they want to forget their own deplorable inefficiency as artists in life.

Addiction is an increasing desire for an act that gives less and less satisfaction

To be a fool at the right time is also an art.

To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything