No man believes that many-textured knowledge and skill - as a just idea of the solar system, or the power of painting flesh, or of reading written harmonies - can come late and of a sudden; yet many will not stick at believing that happiness can come at any day and hour solely by a new disposition of events; though there is nought less capable of a magical production than a mortal's happiness, which is mainly a complex of habitual relations and dispositions not to be wrought by news from foreign parts, or any whirling of fortune's wheel for one on whose brow Time has written legibly.

   ~~~ George Eliot Felix Holt, The Radical (link via Dave Trowbridge)


#