 An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. |
| So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational. |
| One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide. |
| Prudence and compromise are necessary means, but every man should have an impudent end which he will not compromise. |
| The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds. |
| A man may lack everything but tact and conviction and still be a forcible speaker; but without these nothing will avail... Fluency, grace, logical order, and the like, are merely the decorative surface of oratory. |
| To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self. |
| The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse. |
| The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self. |
| Unless a capacity for thinking be accompanied by a capacity for action, a superior mind exists in torture. |
| Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom. |
| There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point. |
| The general fact is that the most effective way of utilizing human energy is through an organized rivalry, which by specialization and social control is, at the same time, organized co-operation. |
| As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters in which we see it. |
| When one ceases from conflict, whether because he has won, because he has lost, or because he cares no more for the game, the virtue passes out of him. |
| The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles. |
| If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted. |
| A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius. |
| There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to "Americanize" him. |
| We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot. |
