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.

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

The impulse to share the lives of the poor, the desire to make social service, irrespective of propaganda, express the spirit of Christ, is as old as Christianity itself.

Perhaps I may record here my protest against the efforts, so often made, to shield children and young people from all that has to do with death and sorrow, to give them a good time at all hazards on the assumption that the ills of life will come soon enough. Young people themselves often resent this attitude on the part of their elders; they feel set aside and belittled as if they were denied the common human experiences.

Even death itself sometimes fails to bring the dignity and serenity which one would fain associate with old age.

That person is most cultivated who is able to put himself in the place of the greatest number of other persons.

A wise man has told us that "men are once for all so made that they prefer a rational world to believe in and live in."