You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.
The boundary between civilization and barbarism is difficult to draw: put one ring in your nose and you are a savage, put two rings in your ears and you are civilized.
Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought.
Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored it is a shadow over all of us, and the shadow is darkest over those who feel it least and allow its evil effects to go on.
The test of a civilization is in the way that it cares for its helpless members.
I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in the kindness of human beings. I am so absorbed in the wonder of earth and the life upon it that I cannot think of heaven and angels.
Truth is always exciting. Speak it, then; life is dull without it.
The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
A hungry man can’t see right or wrong. He just sees food.
We must have hope or starve to death.
We learn as much from sorrow as from joy, as much from illness as from health, from handicap as from advantage and indeed perhaps more.
Every great mistake has a halfway moment, a split second when it can be recalled and perhaps remedied.
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible – and achieve it, generation after generation.
Love dies only when growth stops.
Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.
One faces the future with one’s past.
Let woman out of the home, let man into it, should be the aim of education. The home needs man, and the world outside needs woman.
There is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.
She had always been too wise to tell him all she thought and felt, knowing by some intuition of her own womanhood that no man wants to know everything of any woman.
It is better to learn early of the inevitable depths, for then sorrow and death can take their proper place in life, and one is not afraid.