Adult character grows from earlier habits of perception, so childhood is presented as a formative source rather than a discarded stage.
Poem “My Heart Leaps Up.”
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.”
The verse places change inside a larger rhythm of seasons and purposes, making it useful for thinking about acceptance when one phase of life gives way to another.
Ecclesiastes 3:1 in the King James Version, opening the sequence of contrasting times and seasons.
“Choose what interests you.”
Bennett recommends beginning intellectual cultivation with a subject capable of sustaining real attention instead of selecting study solely for appearance or prestige.
Mental Efficiency, discussion of reading and self-development. The short imperative belongs to Bennett’s practical advice about choosing a field for sustained personal study.
“My trade and art is to live.”
Montaigne makes lived experience itself the central field of inquiry, treating ordinary life as material for reflection rather than a distraction from philosophy.
Essays of Montaigne, Book II, Chapter VI, “Use Makes Perfect,” Charles Cotton translation, W. C. Hazlitt 1877 edition, Project Gutenberg #3600. “My trade and art is to live” occurs while Montaigne defends speaking from his own sense, experience and practice. It remains early-modern autobiographical essay and moral reflection rather than modern therapeutic or behavioral-science evidence.
“Sweet are the uses of adversity.”
Adversity is presented as capable of yielding insight or value even when the experience itself is unwelcome.
As You Like It, Act II, Scene 1, Duke Senior; 1919 Yale Shakespeare edition edited by Jack R. Crawford, printed page 24 / Wikisource scan leaf 36. “Sweet are the uses of adversity” occurs in Duke Senior’s Forest of Arden reflection on exile, winter and the lessons he claims to find outside court life. It remains fictional dramatic speech rather than Shakespeare’s autobiographical advice or a modern psychological claim about hardship.
“To err is human; to forgive, divine.”
Error is treated as ordinary human limitation, while forgiveness requires an additional act of generosity.
An Essay on Criticism, Part III; Pope joins good nature and good sense before contrasting ordinary human error with the higher moral act of forgiveness.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Socrates links a worthwhile human life with reflection on beliefs, conduct, and reasons rather than unexamined routine.
Apology 38a; wording varies by translation.
