“The bashful are always aggressive at heart.”
“To cease to admire is a proof of deterioration.”
“The mind is not a hermit's cell, but a place of hospitality and intercourse.”
“The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society.”
“There is hardly any one so insignificant that he does not seem imposing to some one at some time.”
“There is no way to penetrate the surface of life but by attacking it earnestly at a particular point.”
“We are born to action; and whatever is capable of suggesting and guiding action has power over us from the first.”
“The need to exert power, when thwarted in the open fields of life, is the more likely to assert itself in trifles.”
“A talent somewhat above mediocrity, shrewd and not too sensitive, is more likely to rise in the world than genius.”
“Every general increase of freedom is accompanied by some degeneracy, attributable to the same causes as the freedom.”
“The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.”
“To have no heroes is to have no aspiration, to live on the momentum of the past, to be thrown back upon routine, sensuality, and the narrow self.”
“To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.”
“So far as discipline is concerned, freedom means not its absence but the use of higher and more rational forms as contrasted with those that are lower or less rational.”
“No matter what a man does, he is not fully sane or human unless there is a spirit of freedom in him, a soul unconfined by purpose and larger than the practicable world.”
“A strange and somewhat impassive physiognomy is often, perhaps, an advantage to an orator, or leader of any sort, because it helps to fix the eye and fascinate the mind.”
“There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to ''Americanize'' him.”
“Each man must have his ''I''; it is more necessary to him than bread; and if he does not find scope for it within the existing institutions he will be likely to make trouble.”
“The more developed sexual passion, in both sexes, is very largely an emotion of power, domination, or appropriation. There is no state of feeling that says ''mine, mine,'' more fiercely.”
“We have no higher life that is really apart from other people. It is by imagining them that our personality is built up; to be without the power of imagining them is to be a low-grade idiot.”
“The general fact is that the most effective way of utilizing human energy is through an organized rivalry, which by specialization and social control is, at the same time, organized co-operation.”
“One of the great reasons for the popularity of strikes is that they give the suppressed self a sense of power. For once the human tool knows itself a man, able to stand up and speak a word or strike a blow.”
“The passion of self-aggrandizement is persistent but plastic; it will never disappear from a vigorous mind, but may become morally higher by attaching itself to a larger conception of what constitutes the self.”
“Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.”
“If we divine a discrepancy between a man's words and his character, the whole impression of him becomes broken and painful; he revolts the imagination by his lack of unity, and even the good in him is hardly accepted.”
“We are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined one, and so on. We always imagine, and in imagining share, the judgments of the other mind.”
“Institutions -- government, churches, industries, and the like -- have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.”
“By recognizing a favorable opinion of yourself, and taking pleasure in it, you in a measure give yourself and your peace of mind into the keeping of another, of whose attitude you can never be certain. You have a new source of doubt and apprehension.”
“The human mind is indeed a cave swarming with strange forms of life, most of them unconscious and unilluminated. Unless we can understand something as to how the motives that issue from this obscurity are generated, we can hardly hope to foresee or control them.”
“The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.”