I wonder whether if I had an education I should have been more or less a fool that I am.

Physical pain however great ends in itself and falls away like dry husks from the mind, whilst moral discords and nervous horrors sear the soul.

The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape.

One has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience.

If I can get on to my sofa and occupy myself for four hours, at intervals through the day, scribbling my notes, and able to read the books that belong to me, in that they clarify the density, and shape the formless mass within, life seems inconceivably rich...

What a sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which everyone else is reading