“No pleasure or success in life quite meets the capacity of our hearts. We take in our good things with enthusiasm, and think ourselves happy and satisfied; but afterward, when the froth and foam have subsided, we discover that the goblet is not more than half-filled with the golden liquid that was poured into it.”

On the persistent gap between what we desire and what experience delivers · Essay, Goose-Quill Papers, 1885

• Desire
• Expectation
• Happiness

“Character demonstrates itself in trifles.”

On how the small acts of ordinary life reveal the true self · Essay, Goose-Quill Papers, 1885

• Behaviour
• Character
• Integrity

“A guest should be permitted to graze, as it were, in the pastures of his host’s kindness, left even to his own devices, like a rational being, and handsomely neglected.”

A witty ideal of true hospitality that trusts the guest’s independence · Essay, Goose-Quill Papers, 1885

• Courtesy
• Hospitality
• Independence

“Children are born optimists and we slowly educate them out of their heresy.”

On the gradual loss of childhood’s natural hope through ordinary education · Essay, Goose-Quill Papers, 1885

• Childhood
• Education
• Optimism

“Life is a breathing-space between two eternities, a holiday with appalling realities behind and before.”

A concise view of human existence as brief and bounded by the unknown · Essay, Goose-Quill Papers, 1885

• Eternity
• Life
• Mortality