the only philosophy that amounts to anything, after all, is just the
secret of making friends with our luck.



THE THRILLING MOMENT


"In angling, as in all other recreations into which excitement
enters, we have to be on our guard, so that we can at any moment
throw a weight of self-control into the scale against misfortune;
and happily we can study to some purpose, both to increase our
pleasure in success and to lessen our distress caused by what goes
ill. It is not only in cases of great disasters, however, that the
angler needs self-control. He is perpetually called upon to use it
to withstand small exasperations."--SIR EDWARD GREY: Fly-Fishing.


Every moment of life, I suppose, is more or less of a turning-point.
Opportunities are swarming around us all the time, thicker than
gnats at sundown. We walk through a cloud of chances, and if we
were always conscious of them they would worry us almost to death.

But happily our sense of uncertainty is soothed and cushioned by
habit, so that we can live comfortably with it. Only now and then,
by way of special excitement, it starts up wide awake. We perceive
how delicately our fortune is poised and balanced on the pivot of a
single incident. We get a peep at the oscillating needle, and,
because we have happened to see it tremble, we call our experience a
crisis.