If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.

There is health in table talk and nursery play. We must wear old shoes and have aunts and cousins.

We say love is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage around his eyes. Blind - yes, because he does not see what he does not like; but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love for finding what he seeks, and only that.

As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.

If the race is good, so is the place.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

Man is physical as well as metaphysical, a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.