Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.
For gold is tried in the fire and acceptable men in the furnace of adversity.
To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.
The spirit’s foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication.
The Bible is literature, not dogma.
Friends need not agree in everything or go always together, or have no comparable other friendships of the same intimacy.
Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.
In Greece wise men speak and fools decide.
Periods of tranquillity are seldom prolific of creative achievement. Mankind has to be stirred up.
Fun is a good thing but only when it spoils nothing better.
Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own infinitude, and his infinitude is, in one sense, overcome.
To me, it seems a dreadful indignity to have a soul controlled by geography.
The irrational in the human has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in the maniac, the miser, the drunkard or the ape.
America is a young country with an old mentality.
All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
The primary use of conversation is to satisfy the impulse to talk.
To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood.
There is a kind of courtesy in skepticism. It would be an offense against polite conventions to press our doubts too far.