The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny.

We are sure that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with thespirit of the times. The riddle of the age has for each a private solution.

You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.

But the man and woman of seventy assume to know all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce aspiration, accept the actual for the necessary and talk down to the young. Let them then become organs of the Holy Ghost; let them be lovers; let them behold truth; and their eyes are uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with hope and power.

Underneath the inharmonious and trivial particulars, is a musical perfection, the Ideal journeying always with us, the heaven without rent or seam.

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

The possibility of interpretation lies in the identity of the observer with the observed. Each material thing has its celestial side; has its translation, through humanity, into the spiritual and necessary sphere, where it plays a part as indestructible as any other.