To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
The profoundest affinities are the most readily felt; they remain a background and standard for all happiness and if we trace them out we succeed.
I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart save one that Faith deciphered in the skies.
Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.
Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence.
Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine By which alone the mortal heart is led Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.
Tyrants are seldom free; the cares and the instruments of their tyranny enslave them.
The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too, be lovers in disguise.
Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.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.