Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast. - Logan Pearsall Smith

Most people sell their souls, and live with a good conscience on the proceeds.

When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, Idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.

We all endeavour, as Spinoza says, to persist in our own being; and that endeavour is, he adds, the very essence of our existence. When, therefore, we find that what delighted us once can still delight us: that though the objects of our admiration may be intermittent, yet they move in fixed orbits, and their return is certain, these reappearances will suggest that we have after all maintained something of our own integrity; that a sort of system lies beneath the apparent variability of our interests; that there is, so to speak, a continuity within ourselves, a core of meaning which has not disintegrated with the years.