If you can attribute your success entirely to your own mental effort to your own attitude to some spiritual essence that you have that is better than other people's then that must feel pretty good.

Pessimism only describes an attitude and not facts and hence is entirely subjective.

An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long and the age of the great epics is past.

Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age when the eager passions of youth are cooled and the infirmities of age not yet begun as we see that the shadows which are at morning and evening so large almost entirely disappear at midday.