Trees, though they are cut and lopped, grow up again quickly, but if men are destroyed, it is not easy to get them again.

Our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.

The democratic principle, enunciated in the words of the Declaration of Independence, declared that government was secondary, that the people who established it were primary. Thus, the future of democracy depended on the people, and their growing consciousness of what was the decent way to relate to their fellow human beings all over the world.

A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.

This writer enlarged the American imagination in ways we are only beginning to understand.

The true spirit of delight, the exultation—the sense of being more than Man—is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

the final conclusion reached [by Marx] is that, after the victory of the workers over the bourgeoisie, there will be a society consisting of one class only, and, therefore, a classless society, a society without exploitation; that is to say socialism.

there can be no history of 'the past as it actually did happen;' there can only be historical interpretations and none of them final; every generation has a right to frame its own... Historicism is out to find The Path on which mankind is destined to walk; it is out to discover The Clue To History, or the Meaning of History.

Learn to look with an equal eye upon all beings, seeing the one Self in all.

Think this way about our fleeting world: a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; a flash of lightening in a summer cloud; a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.

The true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.

The true poet has no choice of material. The material plainly chooses him, not he it.

What about your beloved Epictetus? Or your beloved Emily Dickinson? You want your Emily, every time she has an urge to write a poem, to just sit down and say a prayer till her nasty, egotistical urge goes away? No, of course you don’t! But you’d like your friend Professor Tupper’s ego taken away from him.

Everything's a rabbit hole.

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them—if you want to.

The gates of Heaven are open wide; off I ride born on a dark cloud... one Yin for every Yang.

Age creeps on apace, all will soon be over;
If only it could be forever as this time it was!
But man's fate is fixed;
From meetings and partings none can ever escape.

Alas! all joy has vanished from my life,
Alone beside the hill.
Never to follow fashion will I stoop,
Then must live lonely still.