Is there anything in life so disenchanting as achievement?

The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.

My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.

The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.

It is the history of our kindnesses that alone make this world tolerable. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters . . . I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.

When I was a boy, I was a bit puzzled, and hardly knew weather it was myself or the world that was curious and worth looking into. Now I know that it is myself, and stick to that.