Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise.

One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.

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.

There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.

When one ceases from conflict, whether because he has won, because he has lost, or because he cares no more for the game, the virtue passes out of him.

The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them.

We are born to action and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.