It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again. It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult undertaking which, more than anything else, will determine its successful outcome. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible loving human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of pride. As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reasonable arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors. Success plus Self-esteem equals Pretensions. | 
