Better a false belief than no belief at all.

We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.

The idea of duty--that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self--is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

The tendency toward good in human nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which insures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dogmatic perversions.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had no childhood in it if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass . . .