Selfishness has never been admired.

How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?

It is not your business to succeed, but to do right. When you have done so the rest lies with god.

One is given strength to bear what happens to one, but not the 100 and 1 different things that might happen.

Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.

One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.