“The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.”

“There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.”

“The intellectual distinction of a house and its smartness are generally in inverse rather than direct ratio.”

“Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.”

“So few are the easy victories as the ultimate failures.”

“But,instead of what our imagination makes us suppose and which we worthless try to discover,life gives us something that we could hardly imagine.”

“Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.”