The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it

Every thing was to take its natural course, however, neither impelled nor assisted.

At seventeen I'm waiting for my life to actually begin. I'm afraid I'll wake up tomorrow eighty years old and I WILL STILL BE WAITING.

Shortness of life was a primary force in the permanence of institutions, strange though it is to say it. But it is so much easier to hold onto whatever short-term survival scheme you have, rather than risking it all on a new plan that might not work— no matter how destructive your short-term plan might be for the following generations. Let them deal with it, you know. And really, to give them their due, by the time people learned the system they were old and dying, and for the next generation it was all there, massive and entrenched and having to be learned all over again.

There are two kinds of discontented in this world, the discontented that works and the discontented that wrings its hands. The first gets what it wants and the second loses what it has. There is no cure for the first but success and there is no cure at all for the second. The very worst of my vices and bad habits will abate of themselves if they are brought to an accounting every day.

The inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection.