A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.
But trivial as are the topics they are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive. As the reader's eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, it probably alights on something, a bed-post...
A waiter came swiftly along the room, and then stopped dead. His stoppage was as silent as his tread; but all those vague and kindly gentlemen were so used to the utter smoothness of the unseen machin...
A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes, remarked Crook, with some impatience; and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man...
He thought his detective brain as good as the criminal's, which was true. But he fully realised the disadvantage. The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic, he said with a sou...
A man who is perpetually thinking of whether this race or that race is strong, of whether this cause or thatcause is promising, is the man who will never believe in anything long enough to make it suc...
He sometimes felt himself to be a painfully prosaic person, but by the same token he knew he was incurably sane.
And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.
A man who thinks a great deal about himself will try to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excellence at all points, will try to be an encyclopaedia of culture, and his own real personality will be l...