It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine--something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.

I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves

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.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us.

We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.

Jews are not fit for Heaven, but on earth they are most useful.