A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.

A soul is but the last bubble of a long fermentation in the world.

The unforgivable sin is the refusal to pardon.

Even under the most favorable circumstances no mortal can be asked to seize the truth in its wholeness or at its center.

The theater, for all its artifices, depicts life in a sense more truly than history.

Philosophy is a more intense sort of experience than common life is, just as pure and subtle music, heard in retirement, is something keener and more intense than the howling of storms or the rumble of cities.

The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.