I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it — that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it?

Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.

Above all you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world.

Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.

I prefer men to cauliflowers

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall.

Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.