He thought to himself, I’ll never be this perfect again, an idea that made him sad.

He was getting to be a little old for combat or for princesses, but what was worse, he had become a lot more cynical without having become even slightly the wiser.

Invincible ignorance always upset him, even though he knew he should just laugh at it.

It galled him that anybody should think him inferior.

His progress through life was hampered by his tremendous sense of his own ignorance, a disability which affects all too few.

he began to fear that his judgment of them had been blind.

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

That day, I began to be incredulous. Or, rather, I regretted having been credulous. I regretted having allowed myself to be borne away by a passion of the mind. Such is credulity.

If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream.

The difference between him as he was then and as he was now was great ... Then he was a courageous, free man, before whom opened endless possibilities; now he felt himself caught in the tenets of a stupid, idle, aimless, miserable life, from which there was no escape; aye, from which, for the most part, he would not escape. He remembered how he once had prided himself upon his rectitude; how he always made it a rule to tell the truth, and was in reality truthful, and how he was now steeped in falsehood—falsehood which was recognized as truth by all those around him.

He has no native Passion, because he is not a Thinker — & has probably weakened his Intellect by the haunting Fear of becoming extravagant.

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination.

He remembered the dissolute adventures in which his senses, his nervous system and his mind had indulged; he saw himself corroded by irony and intellect, laid waste and paralyzed by insight, almost exhausted by the fevers and chills of creation, helplessly and contritely tossed to and fro between gross extremes, between saintly austerity and lust — oversophisticated and impoverished, worn out by cold, rare artificial ecstasies, lost, ravaged, racked and sick — and he sobbed with remorse and nostalgia.

As usual, He underestimated the human potential for self-deception.