I wish people weren't so set on being themselves, when that means being a bastard. - Robertson Davies

What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.

But I wonder if people do not attach too much importance to the first-name habit? Every man and woman is a mystery, built like those Chinese puzzles which consist of one box inside another, so that ten or twelve boxes have to be opened before the final solution is found. Not more than two or three people have ever penetrated beyond my outside box, and there are not many people whom I have explored further; if anyone imagines that being on first-name terms with somebody magically strips away all the boxes and reveals the inner treasure he still has a great deal to learn about human nature. There are people, of course, who consist only of one box, and that a cardboard carton, containing nothing at all.

The problem for a Paracelsian physician like me is that I see diseases as disguises in which people present me with their wretchedness.