In a modern society people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath by incessant hustling.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart. For we can win a man's heart one day and lose it the next. But when we break a proud spirit we achieve something that is final and absolute.

Help your sister's boat across the water, and yours too will reach the other side. Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.

The link between ideas and action is rarely direct. There is almost always an intermediate step in which the idea is overcome.

One word characterizes the most strenuous of the efforts for the advancement of science that I have made perservereingly during fifty-five years; that word is failure

The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate.

There is probably an element of malice in our readiness to overestimate people - we are, as it were, laying up for ourselves the pleasure of later cutting them down to size.