Optimism will grow like a flower if the soil be properly prepared.

Those who have suffered, who have known poverty or oppression, are generally the most prone to kindness. Perhaps it is well to endure some misery if only to learn this lesson.

We must rejoice when love is great, and pardon its excess, for love is the staff of life, and life without love is life in vain.

We are heirs of the ages because throughout the ages mankind has devised and fashioned new things, and step by step added new conquests to our domain in that incessant contest with nature which means life. But we are decadent heirs if we cannot use the instruments that the ages have put into our hands. The acquisition of these, in the largest scope, is education.

Life is magical. There is something wonderful in being alive, in having within one's self all sorts of possibilities.

The test of education, apart from the accomplishments that secure places in an artificial system, should be this: Let the man be thrown naked on an unknown shore, and be forced to win his way amidst a new people. It may then be of little use to play cricket or to mishandle Tschaikowsky on a piano, but good physique, intelligence, and will power make their way infallibly.

The only atheism is the denial of truth.