Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectfully and unhappy men to live calmly

The sense of an entailed disadvantage - the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather.

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. . . .

Character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.

There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.