If youth is the period of hero-worship, so also is it true that hero-worship, more than anything else, perhaps, gives one the sense of youth. To admire, to expand one's self, to forget the rut, to have a sense of newness and life and hope, is to feel young at any time of life.

To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.

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

The thing that moves us to pride or shame is not the mere mechanical reflection of ourselves but the imagined effect of this reflection upon another's mind.

It is surely a matter of common observation that a man who knows no one thing intimately has no views worth hearing on things in general. The farmer philosophizes in terms of crops, soils, markets, and implements, the mechanic generalizes his experiences of wood and iron, the seaman reaches similar conclusions by his own special road; and if the scholar keeps pace with these it must be by an equally virile productivity.

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.