The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice.

Taste, if it mean anything but a paltry connoisseurship, must mean a general susceptibility to truth and nobleness, a sense to discern, and a heart to love and reverence all beauty, order, goodness, wheresoever, or in whatsoever forms and accompaniments they are to be seen. This surely implies, as its chief condition, not any given external rank or situation, but a finely-gifted mind, purified into harmony with itself, into keenness and justness of vision; above all, kindled into love and generous admiration.

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.

The outer passes away; the innermost is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

I think Scandinavian Paganism, to us here, is more interesting than any other. It is, for one thing, the latest; it continued in these regions of Europe till the eleventh century; 800 years ago the Norwegians were still worshipers of Odin. It is interesting also as the creed of our fathers; the men whose blood still runs in our veins, whom doubtless we still resemble in so many ways.

The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.