Material advancement has its share in moral and intellectual progress. Becky Sharp's acute remark that it is not difficult to be virtuous on ten thousand a year has its applications to nations; and it is futile to expect a hungry and squalid population to be anything but violent and gross.

You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don't have, at the back of yourminds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.

It is not to be forgotten that what we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.

That which endures is not one or another association of living forms, but the process of which the cosmos is the product, and of which these are among the transitory expressions.

Action is the catalyst that creates accomplishments. It is the path that takes us from uncrafted hopes to realized dreams.

Surely it must be plain that an ingenious man could speculate without end on both sides, and find analogies for all his dreams. Nor does it help me to tell me that the aspirations of mankind

Next to being right in this world, the best of all things is to be clearly and definitely wrong, because you will come out somewhere. If you go buzzing about between right and wrong, vibrating and fluctuating, you come out nowhere; but if you are absolutely and thoroughly and persistently wrong, you must, some of these days, have the extreme good fortune of knocking your head against a fact, and that sets you all straight again.