All birth is unwilling.
What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born.
The bitterest creature under heaven is the wife who discovers that her husband’s bravery is only bravado, that his strength is only a uniform, that his power is but a gun in the hands of a fool.
It may be that religion is dead, and if it is, we had better know it and set ourselves to try to discover other sources of moral strength before it is too late.
We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.
Chinese are wise in comprehending without many words what is inevitable and inescapable and therefore only to be borne.
Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.
Life is stronger than death.
Somehow I had learned from Thoreau, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself.
It is better to be first with an ugly woman than the hundreth with a beauty.
Nothing is menial where there is love.
God is not in the vastness of greatness. He is hid in the vastness of smallness. He is not in the general. He is in the particular.
In this unbelievable universe in which we live, there are no absolutes. Even parallel lines, reaching into infinity, meet somewhere yonder.
Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes.
Every event has had its cause, and nothing, not the least wind that blows, is accident or causeless.
A man is educated and turned out to work. But a woman is educated and turned out to grass.
Man was lost if he went to a usurer, for the interest ran faster than a tiger upon him.
Believing in gods always causes confusion.
It is difficult not to wonder whether that combination of elements which produces a machine for labor does not create also a soul of sorts, a dull resentful metallic will, which can rebel at times.
Be born anywhere, little embryo novelist, but do not be born under the shadow of a great creed, not under the burden of original sin, not under the doom of Salvation.