It is a sadness of growing older that some of us lose our ardent appreciation of what is new and different and difficult.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Concern for someone else was a good remedy for taking the mind off one's own troubles.

Clergymen have much the same in their breeches as other men.

Mountains inspire awe in any human person who has a soul. They remind us of our frailty, our unimportance, of the briefness of our span on this earth. They touch the heavens, and sail serenely at an altitude beyond even the imaginings of a mere mortal.

You can't jump down the stairs in one leap, however much you might wish to, and you even more surely can't jump up it, but one step and then the next and there you are, at the top or the bottom and not a bit out of breath or discomposed.

How close the sexes sometimes come to one another. It is as much a matter of behaviour and the spere in which they move that separates the masculine part of humanity from the feminine.