“Our business in life is not to get ahead of other people, but to get ahead of ourselves.”

“Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them. Every one must be challenged. A day dawns, quite like other days; in it, a single hour comes, quite like other hours; but in that day and in that hour the chance of a lifetime faces us”

“To have failed is to have striven, to have striven is to have grown.”

“Can we not appreciate that our very business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get ahead of ourselves? To break our own records, to outstrip our yesterdays by our todays, to bear our trials more beautifully than we ever dreamed we could, to give as we have never given, to do our work with more force and a finer finish than ever—this is the true idea: to get ahead of ourselves.”

“The poet and poetess have always had a rough time of it in the Republic. It has ever been their endemic luck to starve, become a Harvard professor, commit suicide, lose their reading glasses before an audience of sophomores, go upon the people a la Barnum, and serve as homework in state universities, where they could in nowise get a position and where their presence usually scatters the English faculty like a truant officer among the Amish.”

“Many Christians have put the political cart before the theological horse.”

“He thinks of all he has seen and learned: that the universe is indifferent to our human endeavors, that what gives our lives meaning is the passion that invades our hearts and burns in us, and maybe even destroys us.”