How sick one gets of being "good," how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours; embody selfishness.

How fatally the entire want of humor cripples the mind.

The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape

The gain isn't counted to the recluse and inactive that, having nothing to measure themselves by and never being tested by failure, they simmer and soak perpetually in conscious complacency.

Who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?

I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.

It is so comic to hear oneself called old, even at ninety I suppose!