nobody must look into our eyes, still less into our “motives.” And to choose for company that roguish and cheerful vice, politeness. And to remain master of one’s four virtues, courage, insight, sympathy, and solitude. For solitude is a virtue with us, as a sublime bent and bias to purity, which divines that in the contact of man and man — ”in society” — it must be unavoidably impure. All society makes one somehow, somewhere, or sometime — ”commonplace.”

285. The greatest events and thoughts — the greatest thoughts, however, are the greatest events — are longest in being comprehended: the generations which are contemporary with them do not EXPERIENCE such events — they live past them.

Something happens there as