“Close relation in a place like London is a personal mystery as profound as chemical affinity. Thousands pass, and one separates himself from the mass to attach himself to another, and so make, little by little, a group.”

“In Western Europe people perish from the congestion and stifling closeness, but with us it is from the spaciousness…. The expanses are so great that the little man hasn’t the resources to orient himself…. This is what I think about Russian suicides.”

“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.”

“Man is forming thousands of ridiculous relations between himself and God.”

“To be integrated in one another, each person should annul himself before the others. This is done by each seeing the friends' merits and not their faults. But one who thinks that he is a little higher than the friends can no longer unite with them.”

“he liked lofty moral principle and cared little for political tactics; he felt a profound respect for Sumner himself; but the shock opened a chasm in life that never closed, and as long as life lasted, he found himself invariably taking for granted, as a political instinct, with out waiting further experiment — as he took for granted that arsenic poisoned — the rule that a friend in power is a friend lost.”

“It is anything but easy trying to speak of a person one knows so little about but who is nevertheless so close to me.”

“There are so many clues and feelings in the world that it makes a mystery and a mystery means there's a puzzle to be solved. Once you think like that you're hooked on probably finding a meaning, and there' many avenues in life where we're given little indications that the mystery can one day be solved. we get little proofs, — not the big proof — but the little proofs that keep us searching.”

“The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself.”

“A little reflection will enable any person to detect in himself that setness in trifles which is the result of the unwatched instinct of self-will and to establish over himself a jealous guardianship.”