"What’s thinking? You live in a grandly appointed house, but spend all your time rummaging around in the attic for any little trinket you hadn’t known was there."

"I’m sitting here bored, … trying to remember that everything is a complete mystery."

"Happiness, like water, is always available, but so often it seems we’d prefer a different drink."

"Patience is decisive indecision."

"There is no road to the land without roads."

"I am not unambitious. I am just too ambitious for what you call ambitions."

"The mind is like a well-endowed museum, only a small fraction of its holdings on view at any one time."

"The first quest or the first love is also the last. The second isn’t."

"I lied. And my embarrassment was so great that I changed everything else to make the lie true."

"Any virtue systematically applied becomes a vice. Morality is attention, not system."

"Say too soon what you think and you will say what everyone else thinks."

"Birds of prey don’t sing."

"I’ve spent so long trying to fly that it’s too late to set out on foot."

"Yet sadly we feel that many of the noisiest are more interested in their indignation than in the injustice."

"How often feelings are circular. How embarrassing to be embarrassed. How annoying to be annoyed."

"What’s the difference between provincialism, which unthinkingly takes its situation for everyone’s, and cosmopolitanism, which is confident it has the right to?"

"The man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be."

"The new gets old much faster than the old gets older."

"Envy is ashamed of itself. If it weren’t hanging back, it would go all the way to emulation and love."

"First he gathered what he needed. Then he needed to keep gathering what he used to need."

"The best way to get people to do what you want is not to be too particular about what you want."

"It is less important to escape pain than to avoid exceptionless rules."

"Embarrassment is the greatest teacher, but since its lessons are exactly those we have tried hardest to conceal from ourselves, it may teach us, also, to perfect our self-deception."

"Anger has been ready to be angry."

"Water deepens where it has to wait."

"Let me have my dreams but not what I dream of."

"It’s amazing that I sit at my job all day and no one sees me clearly enough to say What is that boy doing behind a desk?"

"To practice Sincerity is to burden everyone else with believing you."

"Beware of knowing your virtues; you may lose them. Beware of knowing your vices; you may forgive them."

"To condemn your sin in another is hypocrisy. Not to condemn is to reserve your right to sin."

"Impatience is not wanting to understand that you don’t understand."

"A day is only a day. But a life is only a life."

"Your choices: spend, and believe in things; save, and believe in money."

"I don’t know what’s meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window."

"I aspire to know when best to walk or eat, which music I need, and how to keep myself sitting as I am now, stubbornly enraptured with doing practically nothing."

"I’ll buy that means also I believe it."

"To know, you just have to know. To believe, you have to make others believe."

"It is clear, we say, as if to see through something were to know it."

"He does not deserve your praise, but he deserves to be treated as if someday he might."