The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.

Life is judged with all the blindness of life itself.

Man alone knows that he must die; but that very knowledge raises him, in a sense, above mortality, by making him a sharer in the vision of eternal truth. He becomes the spectator of his own tragedy; he sympathizes so much with the fury of the storm that he has no ears left for the shipwrecked sailor, though the sailor were his own soul. The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it.

When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and re-establish themselves alone.

Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition, an education, and a career.

Intolerance is a form of egotism, and to condemn egotism intolerantly is to share it.