I believe in the possibility of happiness, if one cultivates intuition and outlives the grosser passions, including optimism.

In unphilosophical minds any rare or unexpected thing excites wonder, while in philosophical minds the familiar excites wonder also.

A buoyant and full-blooded soul has quick senses and miscellaneous sympathies: it changes with the changing world; and when not too much starved or thwarted by circumstances, it finds all things vivid and comic. Life is free play fundamentally and would like to be free play altogether.

A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.

Half our standards come from our first masters, and the other half from our first loves.

The little word is has its tragedies: it marries and identifies different things with the greatest innocence; and yet no two are ever identical, and if therein lies the charm of wedding them and calling them one, therein too lies the danger.

Habit is stronger than reason.