The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which at the same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest type of progress.

I might believe I had unusual talent if I did not know what good music was; I might enjoy half an hour's practice a day if I were busy and happy the rest of the time. You do not know what life means when all the difficulties are removed! I am simply smothered and sickened with advantages. It is like eating a sweet dessert the first thing in the morning.

If the Settlement seeks its expression through social activity, it must learn the difference between mere social unrest and spiritual impulse.

Social advance depends as much upon the process through which it is secured as upon the result itself.

But the paradox is here: when cultivated people do stay away from a certain portion of the population, when all social advantages are persistently withheld, it may be for years, the result itself is pointed to as a reason and is used as an argument for the continued withholding.

The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself.

National events determine our ideals, as much as our ideals determine national events.