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

“The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.”

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

“...genius, having the widest experience of the human intelligence, can best understand the ideas most directly in opposition to those which form the foundation of its own works.”

“Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way”

“People claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.”

“...the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed.”