In each person I catch the fleeting suggestion of something beautiful and swear eternal friendship with that.
Man’s most serious activity is play.
Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.
Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
There is no right government except good government.
Boston is a moral and intellectual nursery always busy applying first principals to trifles.
The fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality.
An ideal cannot wait for its realization to prove its validity.
I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses most of its impressiveness.
There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.
America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.
Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.
Oaths are the fossils of piety.
The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.
With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child’s eyes.
The true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger.
The idea of Christ is much older than Christianity.
Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.
What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?
All beauties are to be honored, but only one embraced.