“One thing only has been lent to youth and age in common–discontent.”

And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and hustle by; And never once possess our soul Before we die.

Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.

It is a very great thing to be able to think as you like; but, after all, an important question remains: what you think.

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.

Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming

If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.

France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.

Ah, love, let us be true To one another!

Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.

Philistinism! – We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.

For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.

Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.

That is sad until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one’s subject matter.

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.

There are two ‘faiths’ which can uphold humans: faith in God and faith in oneself. And these two faiths should exist side by side: the first belongs to one’s inner life, the second to one’s life in society.

I am only at home in the present.

No one will live all his life in the world into which he was born and no one will die in the world in which he worked in his maturity.

I don’t watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

The consciousness of knowing how to make oneself useful, how to help mankind in many ways, fills the soul with noble confidence, almost religious dignity.