for X

A man does not want his national home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt down, because he can hardly count all the things he would miss. Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but is really a house.

It would be worse still if this short human life were broken up into yet shorter lives, each of which was in its turn forgotten.

But I do say, to start with, “What can we do for posterity, except deal fairly with our contemporaries?” Unless a man love his wife whom he has seen, how shall he love his child whom he has not seen?

We are as solid as most truly false things are—a dance of particles in space. Only the things no one can touch are true, as you should know by now.

All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson, are really quite empty of volition. They cannot will, they can hardly wish. And if any one wants a proof of this, it can be found quite easily. It can be found in this fact: that they always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite. Every act of

A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end.

live upon their wits (or not so much, perhaps, upon the presence of their own wits as upon the absence of wits in other people)