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.

The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.

A conception not reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a fraud.

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

To reform means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of this act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.

Saints cannot arise where there have been no warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden in the depths.