To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.

We [may] answer the question: "Why is snow white?" by saying, "For the same reason that soap-suds or whipped eggs are white"-in other words, instead of giving the reason for a fact, we give another example of the same fact. This offering a similar instance, instead of a reason, has often been criticised as one of the forms of logical depravity in men. But manifestly it is not a perverse act of thought, but only an incomplete one. Furnishing parallel cases is the necessary first step towards abstracting the reason imbedded in them all.

Our beliefs and our attention are the same fact.

Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.

We with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground.

In the dim background of our mind we know meanwhile what we ought to be doing: getting up, dressing ourselves, answering the person who has spoken to us, trying to make the next step in our reasoning. But somehow we cannot start.

An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears and in no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is physiologically incomplete... Its motor consequences are what clinch it.