I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so.

Passion is like genius: a miracle.

Discussion is impossible with someone who claims not to seek the truth, but already to possess it.

His (Swami Vivekananda) words are great music, phrases in the style of Beethoven, stirring rhythms like the march of Handel choruses. I cannot touch these sayings of his, scattered as they are through the pages of books, at thirty years' distance, without receiving a thrill through my body like an electric shock. And what shocks, what transports, must have been produced when in burning words they issued from the lips of the hero!

You desire a popular art? Begin by having a "people" whose minds are liberated, a people not crushed by misery and ceaseless toil, not brutalized by every superstition and every fanaticism, a people of itself, and victor in the fight that is being waged today.

Each man must learn his own ideal and try to accomplish it: that is a surer way of progress than to take the ideas of another.

Most men are essentially dead by thirty.