I sacrifice to the God of Beauty — the impulse to beauty in nature. Here are flowers. Here is wine spilled on the floor. I will burn incense & myrhh. I will kneel & strike my breast & touch the dust with my forehead. I will I will! Only do not forsake me, Oh God of beauty.

If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circustance.

You walk into a room, see a woman, and something happens. It's chemical. What are you going to do about it?

Depend on it, that from every condition of distress or evil there is a great reaction, and the greater the evil or distress, the greater the reaction. If we do not get a reaction quick, we will get it long when it does come.

Let no one underestimate the need of pity. We live in a stony universe whose hard, brilliant forces rage fiercely.

And then he sank back and tried, as usual, not to think. He must succeed. That's what the world was made for. That's what he was made for. That was what he would have to do.

The thing that impressed me then as now about New York… was the sharp, and at the same time immense, contrast it showed between the dull and the shrewd, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant… the strong, or those who ultimately dominated, were so very strong, and the weak so very, very weak - and so very, very many.