All living souls welcome whatsoever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

America is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.

Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily.

The world is so ordered that we must, in a material sense, lose everything we have and love, one thing after another, until we ourselves close our eyes.

The highest form of vanity is love of fame.