Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

A task, any task, undertaken in an adventurous spirit acquires the merit of romance.

I let him run on, this papier-maché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe.

I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality

A man is a worker. If he is not that he is nothing.

Youth is insolent; it is its right - its necessity; it has got to assert itself, and all assertion in this world of doubts is a defiance, is an insolence.

Sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self-control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren't.