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The grandest of these ideals is an unfolding American promise that everyone belongs, that everyone deserves a chance, that no insignificant person was ever born.

The hand is my feeler with which I reach through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity that my fingers encounter.

What signifies the census--this periodical numbering of men--to one who has no friend?

Communication is a process of sharing experience till it becomes a common possession.

Even the commonest men reserve the violent, the sulky, the undisguisedly selfish side of their character for those who have no power to withstand it.

Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you.

Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful

It is only when life is sluggish within us that we speak: only at moments when reality lies far away, and we do not wish to be conscious of our brethren.

Some there are that have no silence, and that kill the silence around them, and these are the only creatures that pass through life unperceived.

There is nothing so unsociable and sociable as man, the one by his vice, the other by his nature.

Whereas having many friends puts people apart and severs and disunites them, by transferring and shifting the tie of friendship too frequently, and does not admit of a mixture and welding of goodwill by the diffusing and compacting of intimacy.

it seems to me that the Muses aided our old writers to complete their finest and most esteemed works by calling in exile as a fellow-worker

Society we must have; but let it be society, and not exchanging news, or eating from the same dish.

By this practice he may obtain the solitude of adversity without its melancholy, its instructions without its censures, and its sensibility without its perturbations.

One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings

There is then no sympathy, but an uneasy craving after it, and a dissatisfaction which pursues you on the way, and in the end probably produces ill-humour.

Most of the friends I have seen have turned out the bitterest enemies, or cold, uncomfortable acquaintance.

Old companions are like meats served up too often, that lose their relish and their wholesomeness.