“To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.”

Veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

Decide on what you think is right, and stick to it.

Genius … is necessarily intolerant of fetters.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

One has to spend many years in learning how to be happy.

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.

Appearances have very little to do with happiness.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

“Abroad,” that large home of ruined reputations.

Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.

My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes.

All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.

Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

There is no law governing all things.

I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?

I understand Being in all and over all, as there is nothing without participation in Being, and there is no being without Essence. Thus nothing can be free of the Divine Presence.

If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.

Time takes all and gives all

It has perhaps always been the case that the waging of peace is the hardest form of leadership of all.