At the great moment my will power completely failed me.

In life there is really no great or small thing.

All things are of equal value and of equal size.
My habit--due to indifference chiefly at first--of giving up to you in everything had become insensibly a real part of my nature.

Without my knowing it, it had stereotyped my temperament to one permanent and fatal mood.

That is why, in the subtle epilogue to the first edition of his essays, Pater says that "Failure is to form habits." When he said it the dull Oxford people thought the phrase a mere wilful inversion of the somewhat wearisome text of Aristotelian Ethics, but there is a wonderful, a terrible truth hidden in it.