“Responsibility is the price of freedom.”

The secret of success is this: there is no secret of success.

The man who knows it can’t be done counts the risk, not the reward.

Formal religion was organized for slaves: it offered them consolation which earth did not provide.

All success consists in this: You are doing something for somebody – benefiting humanity – and the feeling of success comes from the consciousness of this.

Faith is the effort to believe what your common sense tells you is not true.

Of all the mental and physical polluters of life, nothing exercises such a poisonous effect as fear.

Anyone who idolizes you is going to hate you when he discovers that you are fallible. He never forgives. He has deceived himself, and he blames you for it.

A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.

Wise Man: One who sees the storm coming before the clouds appear.

What people need and what they want may be very different.

The happiness of this life depends less on what befalls you than the way in which you take it.

A man who marries a woman to educate her falls victim to the same fallacy as the woman who marries a man to reform him.

Progress comes from the intelligent use of experience.

Man’s greatest blunder has been in trying to make peace with the skies instead of making peace with his neighbors.

There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.

Most people like hard work, particularly when they’re paying for it.

Analysis gave me great freedom of emotions and fantastic confidence. I felt I had served my time as a puppet.

They lived freely among the students, they argued with the men over philosophical, sociological and artistic matters, they were just as good as the men themselves: only better, since they were women.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

Give me liberty or give me death.

The question before the House is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Bad men cannot make good citizens. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience are incompatible with freedom.