We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return to at evening.

If you'd take your head home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can't say. But it might.

It is generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer.

The modern world... has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

Nothing is certain by uncertainty.

A man will not roll in the snow for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfill the law of their being. He will not go without food in the name of something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or pretty nearly like this, under quite a different impulse. He will do these things when he is in love.