Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.

You are right,” he had said. “Love is not the word. No one can love his neighbor. Say, rather, ‘Know thy neighbor as thyself.” That is, comprehend his hardships and understand his position, deal with his faults as gently as with your own. Do not judge him where you do not judge yourself. Madame, this is the meaning of the word love.

There is an alchemy in sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom, which, if it does not bring joy, can yet bring happiness.

We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.

War is the most devastating endemic and epidemic disease the human race has to endure, and yet too little has been done to discover and eliminate its cause by intelligent early control.

The highest civilizations -- the longest to last and I believe the most successful in human terms -- are those which have come the closest to achieving real understanding and mutual appreciation between men and women.

Somehow I had learned from Thoreau, who doubtless learned it from Confucius, that if a man comes to do his own good for you, then must you flee that man and save yourself