Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualists, the truth with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-worship.

We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; the slaughterhouses are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer, cleaner and better than the world that really is.

Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude.

Why should we think upon things that are lovely? Because thinking determines life. It is a common habit to blame life upon the environment. Environment modifies life but does not govern life. The soul is stronger than its surroundings.

There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.

How many of us persist in a precipitate course which, but for a moment of heedlessness we might never have entered upon, simply because we hate to change our minds.

All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.