Truths emerge from facts, but they dip forward into facts again and add to them; which facts again create or reveal new truth (the word is indifferent) and so on indefinitely. The 'facts' themselves meanwhile are not true. They simply are. Truth is the function of the beliefs that start and terminate among them.

Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.

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

Man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life

When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.

A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.

So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end...and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.