The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care. We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings. There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth. The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.
True penitence condemns to silence.
What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat. There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us. The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one's own mind. It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.