When a man's life is over, it remains true that he was one sort of man and not another. A man who understands himself under the form of eternity knows the quality that eternally belongs to him, and knows that he cannot wholly die, even if he would, for when the movement of his life is over, the truth of his life remains.

Wisdom lies in taking everything with good humor and a grain of salt.

The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.

Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with the part of another; people are friends in spots.

. . . until the curtain was rung down on the last act of the drama (and it might have no last act!) he wished the intellectual cripples and the moral hunchbacks not to be jeered at; perhaps they might turn out to be the heroes of the play.

Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no motion would be an action, no change a progress.

Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.