“We become more self-centred as we get old, and our environment, the scenery of life, becomes more important.”

Observing how ageing can deepen inwardness and attachment to surroundings · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. II, Chapter XIX

• Nature
• Solitude
• Time

“It was as if I had awoke into another world beyond the pulsation of the senses, a state of things that would last for ever.”

Describing profound stillness as an experience outside ordinary sensory life · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. II, Chapter XIX

• Nature
• Solitude
• Time

“We often say in the battle of life as in the game of chess—Had I only played this, and not that!”

Comparing regret over past choices to replaying a game whose later moves would also change · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Chapter XXIV

• Memory
• Time

“A perfect understanding and sympathy with a single friend of twenty years' standing is something more not less than solitude.”

Presenting deep friendship as compatible with, and richer than, solitude · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. II, Chapter XIX

• Friendship
• Solitude
• Time

“Sympathies even change, so that any friendships save those founded on common sense and moderate affinities of taste come at last to be numbered among the delusions and compromises of life.”

Observing how changing sympathies test friendships over time · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Chapter VIII

• Friendship
• Time
• Truth

“For myself, one absorbing and all-sacrificing passion of friendship has followed another through my life.”

Describing friendship as one of the strongest recurring passions of his life · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Chapter VIII

• Friendship
• Time

“These childish difficulties are in no way different from the mental difficulties of later life.”

Connecting childhood perplexity with the enduring questions of adulthood · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Chapter III

• Childhood
• Time

“The best excuse for them is to be found in the pleasure they may afford, the luxury of again experiencing early emotions and scenes, however faintly.”

Valuing autobiography for the recovered sensation of vanished experience · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Prologue

• Memory
• Time

“The scenery of my own journey, in short—waifs and strays, the finger-posts and milestones of the time past.”

Seeing memory as a landscape marked by fragments and milestones · Autobiographical Notes, Vol. I, Prologue

• Memory
• Time