To understand someone, find out how he spends his money.
Sincerity: willingness to spend one's own money.
Realism absorbs the ideal by adding a few small imperfections. Example: it paints a few specks of mud on the white gown of the Lady in the Garden.
Maxims are sharp-edged half-truths.
Moralists love to discourse on the hollowness of success; about the hollowness of failure they are silent.
Charity does not like arithmetic; selfishness worships it.