The child of civilization, remote from wild nature and all her ways, is more susceptible to her grandeur than is her untutored son who has looked at her and lived close to her from childhood up, on terms of prosaic familiarity.

The doctrine of thrift for the poor is dumb and cruel, like advising them to try and lift themselves by their bootstraps.

The friend of humanity cannot recognize a distinction between what is political and what is not. There is nothing that is not political.

The good Lord sees your heart, not the braid on your jacket, before Him we are all in our birthday suits, generals and common men alike.

The past is immortalized; that is to say, it is dead; and death is the root of all godliness and all abiding significance.

The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.

There is a way of being an artist that goes so deep and is so much a matter of origins and destinies that no longing seems to it sweeter and more worth knowing than longing after the bliss of the commonplace.

There is at bottom only one problem in the world, and this is its name. How does one break through? How does one get into the open? How does one burst the cocoon and become a butterfly?

There lay the little miracle among the pillows: so well formed, so encompassed, as it were, with the harmony of sweet proportions, with little hands that even then, though so much tinier, were beautiful as now; with wide-open eyes blue as the sky and brighter than the sunshine—and almost in that very second he felt himself captured and held fast.

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought—these are the artist’s highest joy.