Form the habit of making decisions when your spirit is fresh ... to let dark moods lead is like choosing cowards to command armies.
Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.
Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.
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.
The bashful are always aggressive at heart.
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.
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.
To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.
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.
Each man must have his I; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.
There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.
We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind.
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.
Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.
The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.
Institutions - government, churches, industries, and the like - have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.
The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.
There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.
The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.
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.
