The wise through excessive wisdom is made a fool.

I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect.

When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?

Appearances to the mind are of four kinds. Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be. Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man’s task.

Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around it comes to you; stretch out your hand, take a portion of it politely. It passes on; do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you. So act toward children, so act toward a wife, so toward office, so toward wealth.

No one returns with good will to the place which has done him a mischief.

Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.

Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.

Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

The growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and . . . each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement.

What is a man in nature? Nothing in relation to the infinite, everything in relation to nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.

Men in general judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration.

Those who would administer wisely must, indeed, be wise, for one of the serious obstacles in the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity.