There Is Something Strangely Determinate And Fatal

The Consolations Of The Vulgar Are Bitter In The Royal Ear. Let Physicians And Confectioners And Servants In The Great Houses Be Judged By What They Have Done, And Even By What They Have Meant To Do; The Great People Themselves Are Judged By What They Are. I Have Been Told That Lions, Trapped And Shut Up In Cages, Grieve From Shame More Than From Hunger.

When We Are Young The Idea Of Death Or Failure Is Intolerable To Us; Even The Possibility Of Ridicule We Cannot Bear. But We Have Also An Unconquerable Faith In Our Own Stars, And In The Impossibility Of Anything Venturing To Go Against Us. As We Grow Old We Slowly Come To Believe That Everything Will Turn Out Badly For Us, And That Failure Is In The Nature Of Things, But Then We Do Not Much Mind What Happens To Us One Way Or The Other. In This Way A Balance Is Obtained.

The Divine Art Is The Story.

What Is It Which Is Bought Dearly, Offered For Nothing, And Then Most Often Refused?--experience, Old People's Experience.

A Giraffe Is So Much A Lady That One Refrains From Thinking Of Her Legs, But Remembers Her As Floating Over The Plains In Long Garb, Draperies Of Morning Mist Her Mirage.