For character too is a process and an unfolding. . . among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful. . . .

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

... it is one of the gains of advancing age that the good of young creatures becomes a more definite intense joy to us. With that renunciation for ourselves which age inevitably brings, we get more freedom of soul to enter into the life of others; what we can never learn they will know, and the gladness which is a departed sunlight to us is rising with the strength of morning to them.

The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.

Perhaps nothing ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late. It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right.

The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.