I am not prepared to deny or assert any proposition which concerns myself; but certainly this solitary struggle with platitudinous atoms, called men and women by courtesy, leads me to wish for my wife again. How did I ever hit on the only woman in the world who fits my cravings and never sounds hollow anywhere? Social chemistry-the mutual attraction of equivalent human molecules-is a science yet to be created, for the fact is my daily study and only satisfaction in life.

It [love] is a disease to be born with patience, like any nervous complaint, and to be treated with counter-irritants.

One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.

A boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame.

The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it.

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.