How loosely our thoughts must hang together when the whiff of a smell, a band playing in the street, a face seen in the fire, or on the gnarled stem of a tree, will lead them into such vagaries at a moment’s warning. v When I was a boy at school at Shrewsbury, old Mrs. Brown used to keep a tray of spoiled tarts which she sold cheaper. They most of them looked pretty right till you handled them. We are all spoiled tarts. vi He is a poor creature who does not believe himself to be better than the whole world else. No matter how ill we may be, or how low we may have fallen, we would not change identity with any other person. Hence our self-conceit sustains and always must sustain us till death takes us and our conceit together so that we need no more sustaining. vii Man must always be a consuming fire or be consumed. As for hell, we are in a burning fiery furnace all our lives—for what is life but a process of combustion? Life i We have got into life by stealth and _petitio principii_, by the free use of that contradiction in terms which we declare to be the most outrageous violation of our reason. We have wriggled into it by holding that everything is both one and many, both infinite in time and space and yet finite, both like and unlike to the same thing, both itself and not itself, both free and yet inexorably fettered, both every adjective in the dictionary and at the same time the flat contradiction of every one of them. ii The beginning of life is the beginning of an illusion to the effect that there is such a thing as free will and that there is such another thing as necessity—the recognition of the fact that there is an “I can” and an “I cannot,” an “I may” and an “I must.” iii Life is not so much a riddle to be read as a Gordian knot that will get cut sooner or later. iv Life is the distribution of an error—or errors. v Murray (the publisher) said that my _Life of Dr. Butler_ was an omnium gatherum. Yes, but life is an omnium gatherum. vi Life is a superstition. But superstitions are not without their value. The snail’s shell is a superstition, slugs have no shells and thrive just as well. But a snail without a shell would not be a slug unless it had also the slug’s indifference to a shell. vii Life is one long process of getting tired. viii My days run through me as water through a sieve. ix Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises. x Life is eight parts cards and two parts play, the unseen world is made manifest to us in the play. xi Lizards generally seem to have lost their tails by the time they reach middle life. So have most men. xii A sense of humour keen enough to show a man his own absurdities, as well as those of other people, will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing. xiii