Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with any honor is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all.
Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it...
Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.
The Universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it alike impressive.
To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful.
Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.
The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.
Art like life, should be free, since both are experimental.
That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions.
Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.
If a man really knew himself he would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.
The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt.
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.
A man’s memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.