... one always believes one's own town to be more stupid than any other.

If I could only fancy myself clever, it would be better, but to be a failure of Nature and to know it is not a comfortable lot. It is the last lesson one learns, to be contented with one's inferiority -- but it must be learned.

It is always chilling, in friendly intercourse, to say you have no opinion to give.

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

bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.

Sympathetic people often don't communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.