The best thing for being sad ... is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you… - T. H. White

The best thing for being sad ... is to learn something.

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails."

"The best cure for grief is learning".

The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails.

...All endeavours which are directed to a purely worldly end...contain within themselves the germs of their own corruption.

The plain of Bedegraine was a forest of pavilions. They looked like old-fashioned bathing tents, and were every colour of the rainbow. ... There were heraldic devices worked or stamped on the sides ... Then there were pennons floating from the tops of the tents, and sheaves of spears leaning against them. The more sporting barons had shields or huge copper basins outside their front doors, and all you had to do was to give a thump on one of these with the butt-end of your spear, for the baron to come out like an angry bee and have a fight with you, almost before the resounding boom had died away. Sir Dinadain, who was a cheerful man, had hung a chamber-pot outside his.

This knight's trouble from his childhood — which he never completely grew out of — was that for him God was a real person. He was not an abstraction who punished you if you were wicked or rewarded you if you were good, but a real person like Guenever, or like Arthur, or like anybody else. Of course he felt that God was better than Guenever or Arthur, but the point was that he was personal. Lancelot had a definite idea of what he looked like, and how he felt — and he was somehow in love with this Person.