It is love itself that is important — the ability to love, no matter whom you love. For when you can no longer love anyone, you are no longer a living person. The heart dies if it loses the capacity to love.
The boundary between civilization and barbarism is difficult to draw: put one ring in your nose and you are a savage, put two rings in your ears and you are civilized.
Inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that is where I renew my springs that never dry up.
For Nature is not unjust. She does not steal into the womb and like an evil fairy give her good gifts secretly to men and deny them to women. Men and women are born free and equal in ability and brain. The injustice begins after birth.
A hungry man can’t see right or wrong. He just sees food.
I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.
I learned to distinguish between the two kinds of people in the world: those who have known inescapable sorrow and those who have not.
there’s two kinds of folk in the world, just like there’s two kinds of life in a seed. Something sends one kind up to hunt its food in the light and air, and sends the other kind down into the earth to make the roots.
The older a people grows, the more it absorbs its own landscape and builds to it.
Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.
Life without idealism is empty indeed. We just hope or starve to death.
In a democracy such as ours the leading minds seldom achieve a place of permanent influence. And the men who sit in Congress or even in the White House are usually not our leading minds. They are not the thinkers. Still less have they time for reflection.
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