People before the public live an imagined life in the thought of others, and flourish or feel faint as their self outside themselves grows bright or dwindles in that mirror.

The word snob belongs to the sour-grape vocabulary.

The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought.

Youth is the time for adventures of the body, but age for the triumphs of the mind.

It's an odd thing about this universe that, though we all disagree with each other, we are all of us always in the right.

We grow with years more fragile in body, but morally stutter, and can throw off the chill of a bad conscience almost at once.

All my life, as down an abyss without a bottom. I have been pouring van loads of information into that vacancy of oblivion I call my mind.