“Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.”
“Because thou must not dream, thou needst not then despair!”
“This strange disease of modern life, with its sick hurry, its divided aims.”
“Resolve to be thyself: and know, that he who finds himself, loses his misery.”
“Still bent to make some port he knows not where, still standing for some false impossible shore.”
“But each day brings its petty dust our soon-choked souls to fill, and we forget because we must, and not because we will.”
“Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”
“Our society distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace; and America is just ourselves with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly.”
“Greatness is a spiritual condition.”
“Journalism is literature in a hurry.”
“The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.”
“Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.”
“Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties!”
“With close-lipped Patience for our only friend, Sad Patience, too near neighbor to Despair.”
“The true meaning of religion is thus, not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.”
“Unquiet souls. In the dark fermentation of earth, in the never idle workshop of nature, in the eternal movement, yea shall find yourselves again.”
“Light half-believers of our casual creeds, who never deeply felt, nor clearly will d, whose insight never has borne fruit in deeds, whose vague resolves never have been fulfilled.”
“The need of expansion is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright. The love of liberty is simply the instinct in man for expansion.”
“Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.”
“The working-class is now issuing from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman's heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes.”
“Protestantism has the method of Jesus with His secret too much left out of mind; Catholicism has His secret with His method too much left out of mind; neither has His unerring balance, His intuition, His sweet reasonableness. But both have hold of a great truth, and get from it a great power.”
“If experience has established any one thing in this world, it has established this: that it is well for any great class and description of men in society to be able to say for itself what it wants, and not to have other classes, the so-called educated and intelligent classes, acting for it as its proctors, and supposed to understand its wants and to provide for them. A class of men may often itself not either fully understand its wants, or adequately express them; but it has a nearer interest and a more sure diligence in the matter than any of its proctors, and therefore a better chance of success.”