I find nothing healthful or exalting in the smooth conventions of society. I do not like the close air of saloons. I begin to suspect myself to be a prisoner, though treated with all this courtesy and luxury. I pay a destructive tax in my conformity.

Neither you nor the world knows what you can do until you have tried.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

I have only one doctrine, the infinitude of the private man.

It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul which animates all men.

It is true that genius takes its rise out of the mountains of rectitude; that all beauty and power which men covet are somehow born out of that Alpine district; that any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.

What is addressed to us for contemplation does not threaten us, but makes us intellectual beings.