A great poet has seldom sung of lawfully wedded happiness, but of free and secret love; and in this respect, too the time is coming when there will no longer be one standard of morality for poetry and another for life. To anyone tender of conscience, the ties formed by a free connection are stronger than the legal ones.

At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

Love has been in perpetual strife with monogamy.

The belief that we some day shall be able to prevent war is to me one with the belief in the possibility of making humanity really human.

The educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.

The home was a closed sphere touched only at its edge by the world's evolution.

All philanthropy ... is only a savory fumigation burning at the mouth of a sewer. This incense offering makes the air more endurable to passers-by, but it does not hinder the infection in the sewer from spreading.