 Any feeling that I was enriching my mind from those surrounding me was unfortunately rare with me. |
| I encountered among my comrades the most varied human traits, from frankness to reserve, from goodness, uprightness and kindness, to brutality and baseness. |
| The stream of time sweeps away errors, and leaves the truth for the inheritance of humanity. |
| I became an ardent, but never a specially good, dancer. |
| I did not know what it was to be happy for a whole day at a time, scarcely for an hour. |
| I was at home then in the world of figures, but not in that of values. |
| A love for humanity came over me, and watered and fertilised the fields of my inner world which had been lying fallow, and this love of humanity vented itself in a vast compassion. |
| School is a foretaste of life. |
| It gradually dawned upon me that there was no one more difficult to please than my mother. |
| I was not given to looking at life in a rosy light. |
| Six hours a day I lived under school discipline in active intercourse with people none of whom were known to those at home, and the other hours of the twenty-four I spent at home, or with relatives of the people at home, none of whom were known to anybody at school. |
| But my doubt would not be overcome. Kierkegaard had declared that it was only to the consciousness of sin that Christianity was not horror or madness. For me it was sometimes both. |
| My father, though, could run very much faster. It was impossible to compete with him on the grass. But it was astonishing how slow old people were. Some of them could not run up a hill and called it trying to climb stairs. |
| I was always hearing that I was pale and thin and small. |
| Being gifted needs courage. |
| The person upon whom the schoolboys' attention centred was, of course, the Headmaster. |
| The war imbued my tin soldiers with quite a new interest. It was impossible to have boxes enough of them. |
| It was jolly in the country. A cow and little pigs to play with and milk warm from the cow. |
| He who does not understand a joke, he does not understand Danish. |
| Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods. |
