Reason and happiness are like other flowers; they wither when plucked.
A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.
The superiority of the distant over the present is only due to the mass and variety of the pleasures that can be suggested, compared with the poverty of those that can at any time be felt.
The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.
The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man’s good is found in another’s evil.
Art is a delayed echo.
He thinks he believes only what he sees, but he is much better at believing than at seeing.
Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
A man’s memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.
Beautiful things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
The habit of looking for beauty in everything makes us notice the shortcomings of things, our sense, hungry for complete satisfaction, misses the perfection it demands.
Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.
Imagination is potentially infinite. Though actually we are limited to the types of experience for which we possess organs, those organs are somewhat plastic. Opportunity will change their scope and even their center.
When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.
Facts are all accidents. They all might have been different. They all may become different. They may all collapse altogether.
Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.
It is a new road to happiness, if you have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that sway you in turn.
A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.
Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.
All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man’s natural sentiment in the face of death.