One can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

No doubt you are right... there would be far less suffering amongst mankind if men... did not employ their imaginations so assiduously in recalling the memory of past sorrow, instead of bearing their present lot with equanimity.

The greater part of all the mischief in the world arises from the fact that men do not sufficiently understand their own aims.

I have by no means an aversion to things Indian, but I am afraid of them, for they draw my imagination into the formless and the diffuse against which I have to guard myself more than ever before.