"One pleasure can kill another pleasure as much as one colour can kill another colour."

I think the truth is this: that the modern world has had far too little understanding of the art of keeping young. Its notion of progress has been to pile one thing on top of another, without caring if each thing was crushed in turn. People forget that the human soul can enjoy a thing most when there is time to think about it and be thankful for it. And by crowding things together they lost the sense of surprise; and surprise is the secret of joy. They forgot that there is a kind of familiarity that really does breed contempt, and that contempt by its nature breeds boredom...

Now this problem is not solved by one side saying that there is far too much pleasure-seeking, and the other side answering that it is natural for the young to seek pleasure. The point is that this may be pleasure-seeking, but it is not pleasure-finding. The cynicism bordering on pessimism, which is the real matter in dispute, would itself be evidence that the pleasure had not been found. And the moral is in a law of the mind which mere anarchy always attempts to forget. One pleasure can kill another pleasure as much as one colour can kill another colour. Every coloured figure requires a background, and is often all the brighter for a grey background or even a black background. The proportions between pleasure and sobriety are a delicate problem, like the proportions between blue and black, or gold and grey. But it is a problem of finding the proportions, and not merely of piling up the pleasures.  Life should be so mixed that there is in all our pleasures a slight element of surprise. Every child understands that; but the question at issue is whether precocious children do not become too clever to understand it.

-December 9, 1922, Illustrated London News