When one has come to accept a certain course as duty he has a pleasant sense of relief and of lifted responsibility, even if the course involves pain and renunciation. It is like obedience to some external authority; any clear way, though it lead to death, is mentally preferable to the tangle of uncertainty.

The most effective way of utilizing human energy is through an organized rivalry, which by specialization and social control is, at the same time, organized co-operation.

The bashful are always aggressive at heart.

We are born to action and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.

Form the habit of making decisions when your spirit is fresh...to let dark moods lead is like choosing cowards to command armies.

Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture.

The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.