“We are least open to precise knowledge concerning the things we are most vehement about.”
“When you automate an industry you modernize it; when you automate a life you primitivize it.”
“The real antichrist is he who turns the wine of an original idea into the water of mediocrity.”
“It still holds true that man is most uniquely human when he turns obstacles into opportunities.”
“Action is at bottom a swinging and flailing of the arms to regain one's balance and keep afloat.”
“We do not really feel grateful toward those who make our dreams come true; they ruin our dreams.”
“It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which we are influenced by those we influence.”
“We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.”
“It sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.”
“The individual who has to justify his existence by his own efforts is in eternal bondage to himself.”
“Where everything is possible miracles become commonplaces, but the familiar ceases to be self-evident.”
“Wise living consists perhaps less in acquiring good habits than in acquiring as few habits as possible.”
“Men weary as much of not doing the things they want to do as of doing the things they do not want to do.”
“How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.”
“Man was nature's mistake --she neglected to finish him -- and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.”
“Naivete in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.”
“We are more prone to generalize the bad than the good. We assume that the bad is more potent and contagious.”
“There is no loneliness greater than the loneliness of a failure. The failure is a stranger in his own house.”
“The self-styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.”
“The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.”
“A successful social technique consists perhaps in finding unobjectionable means for individual self-assertion.”
“Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience.”
“It is the awareness of unfulfilled desires which gives a nation the feeling that it has a mission and a destiny.”
“Disappointment is a sort of bankruptcy -- the bankruptcy of a soul that expends too much in hope and expectation.”
“There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother's keeper will end up by being his jail-keeper.”
“Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains.”
“There is in most passions a shrinking away from ourselves. The passionate pursuer has all the earmarks of a fugitive.”
“Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.”
“A soul that is reluctant to share does not as a rule have much of its own. Miserliness is here a symptom of meagerness.”
“That which corrodes the souls of the persecuted is the monstrous inner agreement with the prevailing prejudice against them.”