What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us. To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser. There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity. The young are often accused of exaggerating their troubles; they do so, very often, in the hope of making some impression upon the inertia and the immovability of the selfish old. The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past. Students today are a pretty solemn lot. One of the really notable achievements of the twentieth century has been to make the young old before their time. Life, as he conceived of it, was a long decline from a glorious past, and if a reader approaches a newspaper in that spirit, he can find much to confirm him in his belief, particularly if he has never examined any short period of the past in day-to-day de If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional and common sense continual. He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities. Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them. | 
