“Politeness is the art of choosing among your thoughts.”

That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.

Men err from selfishness; women because they are weak.

Love is a symbol of eternity. It wipes out all sense of time, destroying all memory of a beginning and all fear of an end.

Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man’s power is increased.

The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals.

A man must know how to fly in the face of opinion; a woman to submit to it.

A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.

Love is the whole history of a woman’s life, it is but an episode in a man’s.

When one prays, he goes to a source of strength greater than his own.

The greatest happiness is to transform one’s feelings into action.

Prayer is more than meditation. In meditation, the source of strength is one’s self.

The sense of this word among the Greeks affords the noblest definition of it; enthusiasm signifies God in us.

The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.

The checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened.

In matters of the heart, nothing is true except the improbable.

Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.

Live never to be ashamed if anything you say or do is published around the world, even if what is said is not true.

We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It’s about conflicts between creation stories.

There is a serious tendency toward capitalism among the well-to-do peasants.

Two hundred million Americans, and there ain’t two good catchers among ’em.

Whitman will always be a strange and unwonted figure among his country’s poets, and among English poets generally: a cropping out again, after so many centuries, of the old bardic prophetic strain.

We moralize among ruins.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control – ‘indoctrination’, we might say – exercised through the mass media.

The pond-lily is a star and easily takes the first place among lilies; and the expeditions to her haunts, and the gathering her where she rocks upon the dark.