convictions ... are always getting in the way of opportunities.

Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.

Theories have nothing to do with life.

Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty.

... the ordinary is simply the universal observed from the surface, that the direct approach to reality is not without, but within. Touch life anywhereand you will touch universality wherever you touch the earth.

It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.

Nothingis so ungrateful as a rising generation; yet, if there is any faintest glimmer of light ahead of us in the present, itwas kindled by the intellectual fires that burned long before us.