The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.
The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
To get away from one’s working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one’s self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.
Failure sometimes enlarges the spirit. You have to fall back upon humanity and God.
Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread.
When one ceases from conflict, whether because he has won, because he has lost, or because he cares no more for the game, the virtue passes out of him.
Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.
The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.
Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.
As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters in which we see it.
One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.
To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.
The most effective way of utilizing human energy is through an organized rivalry, which by specialization and social control is, at the same time, organized co-operation.
I is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be guilty who really saw it as a fact of life.
Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?
Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.
To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.
The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.
The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves but the imagined effect of this reflection upon another’s mind.
Life is a theatre of alarms and contentions.