Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Of new acquaintances one can never be sure because one likes them one day that it will be so the next. Of old friends one is sure that it will be the same yesterday, today, and forever.

The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay; And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day.

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinnertime.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.