To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition.

By recognizing a favorable opinion of yourself, and taking pleasure in it, you in a measure give yourself and your peace of mind into the keeping of another, of whose attitude you can never be certain. You have a new source of doubt and apprehension.

Kindliness seems to exist primarily as an animal instinct, so deeply rooted that mental degeneracy, which works from the top down,does not destroy it until the mind sinks to the lower grades of idiocy.

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

In most cases a favorite writer is more with us in his book than he ever could have been in the flesh; since, being a writer, he is one who has studied and perfected this particular mode of personal incarnation, very likely to the detriment of any other. I should like as a matter of curiosity to see and hear for a moment the men whose works I admire; but I should hardly expect to find further intercourse particularly profitable.

The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves but the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind.

Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?