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

To persuade is more trouble than to dominate, and the powerful seldom take this trouble if they can avoid it.

To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.

I is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be guilty who really saw it as a fact of life.

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.

The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.

Faith in our associates is part of our faith in God.