“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.

In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.

What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.

People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

Life is a series of surprises and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not.

Be not the slave of your own past – plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.

The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.

Be silly. Be honest. Be kind.

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.

For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.

Nature and Books belong to the eyes that see them.

Indians scattered on dawn’s highway bleeding/Ghosts crowd the young child’s fragile eggshell mind.

If you wait for opportunities to occur, you will be one of the crowd.

No reason makes it right To shun accepted ways from stubborn spite; And we may better join the foolish crowd Than cling to wisdom, lonely though unbowed.

When your crowd of attendants so loudly applaud you, Pomponius, it is not you, but your banquet, that is eloquent.

A tale is told of a man in Paris during the upheaval in 1948, who saw a friend marching after a crowd toward the barricades.

There are men and women still on the streets, and that’s all they are saying Can you spare a quarter? I come from a crowd of people who were current on the outlook on life, who were social and knew where they were and had some input into how things seemed to be.

What is possible for individual man is impossible for the masses.

In a crowd, on a journey, at a banquet even, a line of thought can itself provide its own seclusion.