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

Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

Society is an interweaving and interworking of mental selves. I imagine your mind and especially what your mind thinks about my mind and what my mind thinks about what your mind thinks about my mind. I dress my mind before you and expect that you will dress yours before mine. Whoever cannot or will not perform these feats is not properly in the game.

A person of mature years and ripe development, who is expecting nothing from literature but the corroboration and renewal of past ideas, may find satisfaction in a lucidity so complete as to occasion no imaginative excitement, but young and ambitious students are not content with it. They seek the excitement because they are capable of the growth that it accompanies.

We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot.

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