Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.
Her spirits wanted the solitude and silence which only numbers could give.
You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
If you run with the pack, bark or no, but wag your tail.
Explanation:
Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook
Not every mind is to be estimated by the weight of a single folly; not every personality is to be judged by the drag of a single passion.
We live in an age in which the impact of materialized forces is well-nigh irresistible; the spiritual nature is overwhelmed by the shock.
The tremendous and complicated development of our material civilization, the multiplicity, and variety of our social forms, the depth, subtlety, and sophistry of our imaginative impressions, gathered, remultiplied, and disseminated by such agencies as the railroad, the express and the post-office, the telephone, the telegraph, the newspaper, and, in short, the whole machinery of social intercourse—these elements of existence combine to produce what may be termed a kaleidoscopic glitter, a dazzling and confusing phantasmagoria of life that wearies and stultifies the mental and moral nature.
It induces a sort of intellectual fatigue through which we see the ranks of the victims of insomnia, melancholia, and insanity constantly recruited.
Our modern brain-pan does not seem capable as yet of receiving, sorting, and storing the vast army of facts and impressions which present themselves daily.
The white light of publicity is too white.
We are weighed upon by too many things.
It is as if the wisdom of the infinite were struggling to beat itself into finite and cup-big minds.