That knowledge which adds greatness to character is knowledge so handled as to transform every phase of immediate experience.

The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations.

Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter.

In the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute, the race which does not value trained intelligence is doomed. Not all your heroism, not all your social charm, not all your wit, not all your victories on land or at sea, can move back the finger of fate. To-day we maintain ourselves. To-morrow science will have moved forward yet one more step, and there will be no appeal from the judgment which will then be pronounced on the uneducated.

A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.

Without adventure all civilization is full of decay. Adventure rarely reaches its predetermined end. Columbus never reached China.

I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.