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

Form the habit of making decisions when your spirit is fresh...to let dark moods lead is like choosing cowards to command armies.

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.

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

Could anything be more indicative of a slight but general insanity than the aspect of the crowd on the streets of Chicago?

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

Simplicity is a pleasant thing in children, or at any age, but it is not necessarily admirable, nor is affectation altogether a thing of evil. To be normal, to be at home in the world, with a prospect of power, usefulness, or success, the person must have that imaginative insight into other minds that underlies tact and savoir-faire, morality and beneficence. This insight involves sophistication, some understanding and sharing of the clandestine impulses of human nature. A simplicity that is merely the lack of this insight indicates a sort of defect.