When you paint things exactly as they are, you don't show people anything that they couldn't see for themselves; you're telling them what they already know.
There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.
Failures to love are irremediable and irredeemable.
One of the uncovenanted benefits of living for a long time is that, having so many more dead than living friends, death can appear as a step backwards into the joyous past.
In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise.
. . . we do not remember people as they were. What we remember is the effect they had on us then, but we remember it through an emotion charged with all that has since happened to us.
Nothing lasts. Not even a great sorrow.
Good sense is the most equitably distributed of all things because no matter how much or little a person has, everyone feels so abundantly provided with good sense that he feels no desire for more than he already possesses.
I'm constantly having doubts and moments of depression and then excitement and then back into the slough of despond.
Happy are those who have overcome their egos; happy are those who have attained peace; happy are those who have found the Truth.
Some things are fairly obvious when it's a seven-foot skeleton with a scythe telling you them