It is an exceptional thing to find beauty, youth, compatibility, intelligence, your own point of view — softened and charmingly emotionalized — in an… - Theodore Dreiser

Like the large majority of those who profess and daily repeat the dogmas and creeds of the world, she had come into her practices and imagined attitude so insensibly from her earliest childhood on, that up to this time, and even later, she did not know the meaning of it all.

what matter it if a man gaineth the whole world and loseth his own soul?

It was that old mass yearning for a likeness in all things that troubled them, and him.