Be what you are, and become what you are capable of becoming.

To make our morality center on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow men a secret element of gusto.

We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.

[T]he kingdom of heaven is of the childlike, of those who are easy to please, who love and who give pleasure. Mighty men of their hands, the smiters and the builders and the judges, have lived long and done sternly and yet preserved this lovely character; and among our carpet interests and twopenny concerns, the shame were indelible if we should lose it. Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties.

By the time a man gets well into his seventies his continued existence is a mere miracle.

Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other, both in mind and body.

When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium; and consider one who writes them as a sort of doctor of the mind.