What I really need is to get clear out about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge precedes every act.

The melancholy have the best sense of the comic, the opulent often the best sense of the rustic, the dissolute often the best sense of the moral, and the doubter often the best sense of the religious.

For like a poisonous breath over the fields, like a mass of locusts over Egypt, so the swarm of excuses is a general plaque, a ruinous infection among men, that eats off the sprouts of the Eternal.

Without risk, faith is an impossibility.

...why bother remembering a past that cannot be made into a present?

Talent warms-up the given (as they say in cookery) and makes it apparent; genius brings something new. But our time lets talent pass for genius. They want to abolish the genius, deify the genius, and let talent forge ahead.

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.