If love closes, the self contracts and hardens: the mind having nothing else to occupy its attention and give it that change and renewal it requires, busies itself more and more with self-feeling, which takes on narrow and disgusting forms, like avarice, arrogance and fatuity.

To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition.

Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.

The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.

There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.

When we hate a person, with an intimate, imaginative, human hatred, we enter into his mind, or sympathize -- any strong interest will arouse the imagination and create some sort of sympathy.

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