To persuade is more trouble than to dominate, and the powerful seldom take this trouble if they can avoid it.
If love closes, the self contracts and hardens: the mind having nothing else to occupy its attention and give it that change and renewal it requires, busies itself more and more with self-feeling, which takes on narrow and disgusting forms, like avarice, arrogance and fatuity.
Faith in our associates is part of our faith in God.
To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition.
When we hate a person, with an intimate, imaginative, human hatred, we enter into his mind, or sympathize – any strong interest will arouse the imagination and create some sort of sympathy.
The idea of freedom is quite in accord with a general, though vague, sentiment among us; it is an idea of fair play, of giving everyone a chance; and nothing arouses more general and active indignation among our people than the belief that some one or some class is not getting a fair chance.
To desire to be an artist is to desire to be a complete man in respect to some one function, to realize yourself utterly. A man is a poor thing who is content not to be an artist.
Selfishness of the stable or rigid sort is as a rule more bitterly resented than the more fickle variety, chiefly, no doubt, because, having more continuity and purpose, it is more formidable.
Freedom is the opportunity for right development, for development in accordance with the progressive ideal of life that we have in conscience.
So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational.
We are born to action and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.
A strange and somewhat impassive physiognomy is often, perhaps, an advantage to an orator, or leader of any sort, because it helps to fix the eye and fascinate the mind.
No matter what a man does, he is not fully sane or human unless there is a spirit of freedom in him, a soul unconfined by purpose and larger than the practicable world.
If we divine a discrepancy between a man’s words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted.
The passion of self-aggrandizement is persistent but plastic; it will never disappear from a vigorous mind, but may become morally higher by attaching itself to a larger conception of what constitutes the self.
If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one’s self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life.
We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot.
There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.
The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.
The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.