Is there anything in life so disenchanting as achievement?

If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.

Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence.

We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the saying goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march.

All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.

We fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of fear and pain.