Love cannot live where there is no trust.
He drew iron tears down Pluto’s cheek and make Hell grant what Love did seek.
The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.
Faith is not belief. Belief is passive. Faith is active.
Pain is the most individualized thing on earth. It is true that it is the great common bond as well, but that realization only comes when it is over. To suffer is to be alone. To watch another suffer is to know the barrier that shuts each of us away by himself Only individuals can suffer.
It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought-that is to be educated.
Uncertainty is the prerequisite to gaining knowledge and frequently the result as well.
Responsibility is the price every man must pay for freedom.
When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.
There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book.
It is not hard work that is dreary; it is superficial work.
The mind knows only what lies near the heart.
The fullness of life is in the hazards of life.
None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
The easy way has never in the long run commanded the allegiance of mankind.
Old ideas are continually being slain by new facts. There is nothing stable in the conclusions of the mind, and it is impossible that there ever should be unless we hold that the universe is made to the measure of the human mind, an assumption for which nothing in the past gives any warrant.
A people’s literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.