The most peculiar social self which one is apt to have is in the mind of the person one is in love with.

I am well aware how odd it must seem to some of you to hear me say that an idea is true so long as to believe it is profitable to our lives

The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.

The strenuous life tastes better

Language is the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought.

If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.

Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose.