Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.

What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!

I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in what is false, while we don't mind how hard the truth is for the neighbors outside our walls. I think we have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.

Appearances have very little to do with happiness.

Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.

... indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable.