I walked with a friend, a Quaker, to the newsstand the other night, and she bought a paper, thanking the newsboy politely. The newsboy didn't even acknowledge it. She refuses to return incivility for incivility, because then she would no longer be in command of her own conduct.
Nobody is unhappier than the perpetual reactor.
His center of emotional gravity is not rooted within himself, where it belongs, but in the world outside him. His temperature is always being raised or lowered by the social climate around him, and he is a mere creature at the mercy of those elements. Praise gives him a feeling of euphoria, which is false, because it does not last and it does not come from self-approval. Criticism depresses him more than it should, because it confirms his own secretly shaken opinion of himself. Snubs hurt him, and the merest suspicion of unpopularity in any quarter rouses him to bitterness.