Twenty-four
Some people have a gift of conjuring with conversations. They are almost always frankly and openly interested in themselves. You may seek to foil them; you may even violently wrench the conversation into other directions. But every effort will be useless. They will beat you. You had much better lean back in your chair and enjoy their legerdemain.
Twenty-five
The voice of this spirit says that it has lost every illusion about life, and that life seems only the more beautiful. It says that activity is but another form of contemplation, pain but another form of pleasure, power but another form of weakness, hate but another form of love, and that it is well these things should be so. It says there is no end, only a means; and that the highest joy is to suffer, and the supreme wisdom is to exist. If you will but live, it cries, that grave but yet passionate voice—if you will but live! Were there a heaven, and you reached it, you could do no more than live. The true heaven is here where you live, where you strive and lose, and weep and laugh. And the true hell is here, where you forget to live, and blind your eyes to the omnipresent and terrible beauty of existence.
Twenty-six
The most important preliminary to self-development is the faculty of concentrating at will.
Twenty-seven
Diaries, save in experienced hands, are apt to get themselves done with the very minimum of mental effort. They also tend to an exaggeration of egotism, and if they are left lying about they tend to strife.
Twenty-eight
The English world of home is one of the most perfectly organized microcosms on this planet, not excepting the Indian purdah. The product of centuries of culture, it is regarded, not too absurdly, as the fairest flower of Christian civilisation. It exists chiefly, of course, for women, but it could never have been what it is had not men bound themselves to respect the code which they made for it. It is the fountain of refinement and of consolation, the nursery of affection. It has the peculiar faculty of nourishing itself, for it implicitly denies the existence of anything beyond its doorstep, save the constitution, a bishop, a rector, the seaside, Switzerland, and the respectful poor.