If I were to choose among all gifts and qualities that which, on the whole, makes life pleasantest, I should select the love of children. No circumstance can render this world wholly a solitude to one who has this possession

Noble discontent is the path to heaven.

Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes.

To be really cosmopolitan a man must be at home even in his own country.

After all, when a thought takes one's breath away, a lesson on grammar seems an impertinence.

Travelers find virtue in a seeming minority in all other countries, and forget that they have left it in a minority at home.

All... religions show the same disparity between belief and practice, and each is safe till it tries to exclude the rest. Test each sect by its best or its worst as you will, by its high-water mark of virtue or its low-water mark of vice. But falsehood begins when you measure the ebb of any other religion against the flood-tide of your own. There is a noble and a base side to every history.