Status Updates From Cartas del diablo a su sobrino

And Nothing is strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, (…) of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, he is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

‘ All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing *neither* what I ought *nor* what I liked". ‘