Men talk as if victory were something fortunate. Work is victory.

Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of nature,--the sweet, without the other side,--the bitter.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

It is the fine souls who serve us, and not what is called fine society. Fine society is only a self-protection against the vulgarities of the street and the tavern.

There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

Goodness that preaches undoes itself.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.