The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.

What greater reassurance can the weak have than that they are like anyone else?

It is not so much the example of others we imitate as the reflection of ourselves in their eyes and the echo of ourselves in their words.

To dispose a soul to action we must upset its equilibrium.

Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a "city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven" and who believed that "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.

The pre-human creature from which man evolved was unlike any other living thing in its malicious viciousness toward its own kind. Humanization was not a leap forward but a groping toward survival.