middlemarch

Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

Burnout at its deepest level is not the result of some train wreck of examinations, long call shifts, or poor clinical evaluations. It is the sum total of hundreds and thousands of tiny betrayals of purpose, each one so minute that it hardly attracts notice. When a great ship steams across the ocean, even tiny ripples can accumulate over time, precipitating a dramatic shift in course. There are many Tertius Lydgates, male and female, inhabiting the lecture halls, laboratories, and clinics of today__ medical schools. Like latter-day Lydgates, many of them eventually find themselves expressing amazement and disgust at how far they have veered from their primary purpose.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life__he life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it__an understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

Pride helps us

The days were longer then (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.

...but prejudices, like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle _ solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness.