Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.

Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.

Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like home.

The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who don't understand it.

The aim of life is some way of living, as flexible and gentle as human nature; so that ambition may stoop to kindness, and philosophy to condor and humor. Neither prosperity nor empire nor heaven can be worth winning at the price of a virulent temper, bloody hands, an anguished spirit, and a vain hatred of the rest of the world.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval. The dark background which death supplies brings out the tender colours of life in all their purity.

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal.