Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.

The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to them her latest wonder.

With subtle and finely-wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and the sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.

We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the courage to yield to.

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.