Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain

Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.

I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of something he cannot understand.

It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.

Theology is simply that part of religion that requires brains.

A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.