Talent is the capacity to direct concentrated attention upon the subject: "the gift of seeing what others have not seen.

I often think how unfairly life's good fortune is sometimes distributed.

This is where the strength of the physician lies, be he a quack, a homeopath or an allopath. He supplies the perennial demand for comfort, the craving for sympathy that every human sufferer feels.

Humanity unceasingly strives forward from a lower, more partial and obscure understanding of life to one more general and more lucid.

Music makes me forget my real situation. It transports me into a state which is not my own. Under the influence of music I really seem to feel what I do not feel, to understand what I do not understand, to have powers which I cannot have. Music seems to me to act like yawning or laughter; I have no desire to sleep, but I yawn when I see others yawn; with no reason to laugh, I laugh when I hear others laugh. And music transports me immediately into the condition of soul in which he who wrote the music found himself at that time. ~The Kreutzer Sonata

Here I am alive, and it's not my fault, so I have to try and get by as best I can without hurting anybody until death takes over.

An arrogant person considers himself perfect. This is the chief harm of arrogance. It interferes with a person's main task in life—becoming a better person.