Another is the paradox of courage; the fact that the way
to avoid death is not to have too much aversion to it.
Whoever is careless enough of his bones to climb some hopeful
cliff above the tide may save his bones by that carelessness.
Whoever will lose his life, the same shall save it;
an entirely practical and prosaic statement.

Now, one of these four or five paradoxes which should be taught
to every infant prattling at his mother's knee is the following:
That the more a man looks at a thing, the less he can see it,
and the more a man learns a thing the less he knows it.
The Fabian argument of the expert, that the man who is trained
should be the man who is trusted would be absolutely unanswerable
if it were really true that a man who studied a thing and practiced
it every day went on seeing more and more of its significance.
But he does not. He goes on seeing less and less of its significance.
In the same way, alas! we all go on every day, unless we are
continually goading ourselves into gratitude and humility,
seeing less and less of the significance of the sky or the stones.

. . . . .

Now it is a terrible business to mark a man out for the vengeance of men.
But it is a thing to which a man can grow accustomed, as he can
to other terrible things; he can even grow accustomed to the sun.
And the horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best,
about all judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policemen,
is not that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they
are stupid (several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply
that they have got used to it.