That so few dare be eccentric marks the chief danger of our time. - John Stuart Mill

A cultivated mind — I do not mean that of a philosopher, but any mind to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties — finds sources of inexhaustible interest in all that surrounds it: in the objects of nature, the achievements of art, the imaginations of poetry, the incidents of history, the ways of mankind, past and present, and their prospects in the future.

It is safe to say that the
knowledge men can acquire of women, even as they have
been and are — never mind what they could be — is wretchedly
incomplete and superficial, and that it always will be so until
women themselves have told all that they have to tell.

Truth, in the great practical concerns
of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and
combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently
capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an
approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough
process of a struggle between combatants fighting under
hostile banners.