For greatness after all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be present in liv… - Phillips Brooks

If you limit the search for truth and forbid men anywhere, in any way, to seek knowledge, you paralyze the vital force of truth itself.
In the best sense of the word, Jesus was a radical. His religion has been so long identified with conservation — often with conservatism of the obstinate and unyielding sort — that it is almost startling for us sometimes to remember that all of the conservatism of his own times was against him; that it was the young, free, restless, sanguine, progressive part of the people who flocked to him.

Every time we see a man who has attained our human ideal a little more fully than we have, it wakens our languid blood and fills us with new longings.

Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.