“Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.”

Our inequality materializes our upper class, vulgarizes our middle class, brutalizes our lower class.

Business could not make dull, nor passion wild; Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Not deep the poet sees, but wide.

The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.

If there ever comes a time when the women of the world come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a force such as the world has never known.

Tis not to see the world As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes, And heart profoundly stirred; And weep, and feel the fullness of the past, The years that are not more.

And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well — but ’tis not true!

Sanity — that is the great virtue of the ancient literature; the want of that is the great defect of the modern, in spite of its variety and power.

Coleridge: poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium.

But there remains the question: what righteousness really is. The method and secret and sweet reasonableness of Jesus.

For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion.

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret.

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires, She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.

Years hence, perhaps, may dawn an age, More fortunate, alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.

The sophist sneers: Fool, take Thy pleasure, right or wrong! The pious wail: Forsake A world these sophists throng! Be neither saint nor sophist-led, but be a man.

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author’s life.

Justice is never given; it is exacted.

Though men are apt to flatter and exalt themselves with their great achievements, yet these are, in truth, very often owing not so much to design as chance.

There’s nothing better than having an experience now that’s the exact same thing.

Justice is never given; it is exacted and the struggle must be continuous for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationship.

Just didn’t know whether I would finish the book much less for it to come close to what I intended. I think that for any novel you never know exactly how the book is going to turn out…

Sometimes they are the same exact thing.

I often say to my assistants, “Never trust anybody,” but what I mean is that you should never trust someone else to do a job exactly the way you would want it done.