A nation never falls but by suicide.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.

Our first mistake is the belief that the circumstance gives the joy which we give to the circumstance.

Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.

We have more than we use.

A man of no conversation should smoke.

The poor and the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. "Blessed be nothing," and "The worse things are, the better they are," are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.