A certain amount of boredom is… essential to a happy life.

There can be no final goal for human institutions; the best are those that most encourage progress towards others still better. Without effort and change, human life cannot remain good. It is not a finished Utopia that we ought to desire, but a world where imagination and hope are alive and active.

Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation, or creed.

Don't let the old break you; let the love make you.

The belief in a happy "state of nature" in the remote past is derived partly from the biblical narrative of the age of the patriarchs, partly from the classical myth of the golden age. The general belief in the badness of the remote past only came with the doctrine of evolution.

Reverence for human personality is the beginning of wisdom, in every social question, but above all in education.

Perhaps the greatest importance of the family, in these days of contraceptives, is that it preserves the habit of having children.