The wise man is he who knows the relative value of things.

Man, as we know him, is a poor creature; he is halfway between an ape and a god and he is travelling in the right direction.

Many people believe that they are attracted by God, or by Nature, when they are only repelled by man.

For better or worse, man is the tool-using animal, and as such he has become the lord of creation. When he is lord also of himself, he will deserve his self-chosen title homo sapiens.

A man is never so truly and intensely himself as when he is most possessed by God. It is impossible to say where, in the spiritual life, the human will leaves off and divine grace begins.

The jealous man is so preoccupied with what he hasn't got that he fails to appreciate the value of what he has got. He loses the ability to feel glad because the sun is shining. He doesn't see the wonder and the newness of the beginning of spring.

The greatest obstacle to progress is not man's inherited pugnacity, but his incorrigible tendency to parasitism.

The fruit of the tree of knowledge always drives man from some paradise or other; and even the paradise of fools is not an unpleasant abode while it is habitable.

But the instinct of hoarding, like all other instincts, tends to become hypertrophied and perverted; and with the institution of private property comes another institution-that of plunder and brigandage. In private life, no motive of action is at present so powerful and so persistent as acquisitiveness, which unlike most other desires, knows no satiety. The average man is rich enough when he has a little more than he has got, and not till then.