for X

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)

A child, not knowing what is extraordinary and what commonplace, usually lights midway between the two, finds interest in incidents adults consider beneath notice and calmly accepts the most improbable occurrences.

Do you, I wonder, little children, who read this story? Or are you like the boy in the kindergarten to whom I was telling a fairy story and who interrupted me contemptuously with the remark: "Fairies don't exist!" "O don't they my little man!" said I. "Well you think so." Presently we read of a ball that grew, and he s

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.

being—for what being can be stranger than oneself, or act more inexplicably?

They never fell into the habit of the idle revolutionists of supposing that the past was bad because the future was good, which amounted to asserting that because humanity had never made anything but mistakes it was now quite certain to be right.

For the perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them;

Democracy is never quite democratic except when it is quite direct; and it is never quite direct except when it is quite small.

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