The soul, too has her virginity and must bleed a little before bearing fruit.

There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books.

A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.

Rejection is a form of self-assertion. You have only to look back upon yourself as a person who hates this or that to discover what it is that you secretly love.

It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.

The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.