If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters.

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

Love is a brilliant illustration of a principle everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods.

Heaven is to be at peace with things.

There is no greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know that many are, have been, and will be better than he.

Never build your emotional life on the weaknesses of others.

Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?