Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

The miser is the man who starves himself and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

Thoughts on the Merits of Work The worst of work nowadays is what happens to people when they cease to work.

No animal ever invented anything as bad as drunkenness - or so good as drink.

In the fairy tale, an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten and cities perish. A lamp is lit and love flies away. An apple is eaten and the hope of God is gone.

One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place.

But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose.