After-Orts #44
Kindness is a language the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
— widely, and wrongly, attributed to Mark Twain. The correct quote seems to be:
Kindness. A language which the dumb can speak, and the deaf can understand.
https://marktwainstudies.com/apocryphaltwainoptimism/
What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, and every day, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those other things, are his history. His acts and his words are merely the visible, thin crust of his world, with its scattered snow summits and its vacant wastes of water—and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden—it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written. Every day would make a whole book of eighty thousand words—three hundred and sixty-five books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
— Mark Twain
daybyday.marktwainstudies.com
Some people say that their schooldays were the happiest in their lives. They may be right, but I look with suspicion upon those whom I hear saying this. It is hard enough to know whether one is happy or unhappy now, and still harder to compare the relative happiness or unhappiness of different times of one's life; the utmost that can be said is that we are fairly happy so long as we are not distinctly aware of being miserable.
-- Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, quoted in Robert Graves, The Reader Over Your Shoulder, chapter 9
The food often grows in one country and the sauce in another.
-- Joseph Addison (1672-1719), quoted in Robert Graves, The Reader Over Your Shoulder, chapter 7