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

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

The actual God of many Americans... is simply the current of American life.

Kindliness seems to exist primarily as an animal instinct, so deeply rooted that mental degeneracy, which works from the top down,does not destroy it until the mind sinks to the lower grades of idiocy.

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

One of the great reasons for the popularity of strikes is that they give the suppressed self a sense of power. For once the human tool knows itself a man, able to stand up and speak a word or strike a blow.

No matter what a man does, he is not fully sane or human unless there is a spirit of freedom in him, a soul unconfined by purpose and larger than the practicable world.