Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

The worst of charity is that the lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.

To believe in luck ... is skepticism.

What omniscience has music! So absolutely impersonal, and yet every sufferer feels his secret sorrow soothed.

Nature arms each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat impossible to any other.

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments and modes of action.

The common experience is, that the man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns a spit. Then he is part of the machine he moves; the man is lost.