He who comes from the kitchen smells of its smoke; he who adheres to a sect has something of its cant; the college air pursues the student, and dry inhumanity him who herds with literary pedants.

Wherever you spend your time leaves a smell on you that you cannot detect yourself. The group’s phrases become your phrases, its enemies your enemies, its blind spots invisible to you in exactly the way they are to everyone else inside. That is not a reason to belong to nothing; it is a reason to keep at least one friend who is not in the same room as you.

Ask someone outside your world what you sound like when you talk about it. Take the answer without defending yourself, and use it to work out which of your opinions you arrived at and which you absorbed.