And now I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolations that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything; that only a fool can become something. Yes, sir, an intelligent nineteenth-century man must be, is morally bound to be, an essentially characterless creature; and a man of character, a man of action - an essentially limited creature. This is my conviction at the age of forty. I am forty now, and forty years - why, it is all of a lifetime, it is the deepest of old age. Living past forty is indecent, vulgar, immoral!
The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, "the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air of well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that escort us through life,--we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us.
A human life the treasure of the world cannot buy; nor can it redeem one which is misspent; nor can it make full and complete and beautiful a life which is dwarfed and warped and ugly.
If you leave the pool you have dug for yourself and go out into the river of life then life has an astonishing way of taking care of you, because then there is no taking care on your part.
Each human being has been granted a virtue: the capacity to choose. For he who does not use this virtue, it becomes a curse - and others will always choose for him.