It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.

I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces, so full of stupid importance.

Gossip is what no one claims to like, but everybody enjoys.

Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.

Criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters.