What interest, zest, or excitement can there be in achieving the right way, unless we are enabled to feel that the wrong way is also a possible and a natural way, nay, more, a menacing and an imminent way? And what sense can there be in condemning ourselves for taking the wrong way, unless we need have done nothing of the sort, unless the right way was open to us as well? I cannot understand the willingness to act, no matter how we feel, without the belief that acts are really good and bad.

Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life's supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man's frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.

To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them ratified.

For I had often said that the best argument I knew for an immortal life was the existence of a man who deserved one as well as Child did.

Once you accept an idea, it's an idea whose time has come.

Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

I don't see how an epigram, being a bolt from the blue, with no introduction or cue, ever gets itself writ.