“Every man is a creature of the age in which he lives and few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.”

“Life is not an easy matter…. You cannot live through it without falling into frustration and cynicism unless you have before you a great idea which raises you above personal misery, above weakness, above all kinds of perfidy and baseness.”

“Like the vain curlings of the watery maze,Which in smooth streams a sinking weight does raise,So Man, declining always, disappearsIn the weak circles of increasing years;And his short tumults of themselves compose,While flowing Time above his head does close.”

“every man is free to rise as far as he's able or willing, but the degree to which he thinks determines the degree to which he'll rise.”

“Every man and every living creature has a sacred right to the gladness of springtime.”

“The ideals and objectives of yesterday was still ideals of today, but they lost some of their luster and even, as one seemed to go towards them, they lost the shining beauty which had warmed the heart and vitalized the body. Evil triumphed often enough, but what was far worse was the coarsening and distortion of what seemed so right. Was human nature so essentially bad that it would take ages of training ,through suffering and misfortune, before it could behave reasonably and raise man above the creature of lust and violence and deceit that he now was? And, meanwhile , was every effort to change radically in the present or the near future doomed to failure”