The soft-minded man always fears change. He feels security in the status quo, and he has an almost morbid fear of the new. For him, the greatest pain is the pain of a new idea.

A man cannot serve two masters: so it is either reason or the scriptures. - On Religion

We sometimes forget even what we have done, so how much more what we have thought.

Hence much reading deprives the mind of all elasticity, as a weight continually pressing upon it does a spring, and the most certain means of never having any original thoughts is to take a book in hand at once, at every spare moment. This practice is the reason why scholarship makes most men more unintelligent and stupid than they are by nature, and deprives their writings of all success; they are, as Pope says— 'For ever reading, never to be read'.

The anxieties of all of us, our worries, vexations, bothers, troubles, uneasy apprehensions and strenuous efforts are due, in perhaps the large majority of instances, to what other people will say;

it is worthy of consideration, indeed marvelous, how besides his life in concreto, a person always leads a second in abstracto as well.

I wasn't cute or passive enough to be femme, and I wasn't mean or tough enough to be butch. I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community.

For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.

Each of us struggles daily with the pressures of conformity and the loneliness of difference from which those choices seem to offer escape.

There was a pain in Muriel to become herself that engaged my heart. I knew what it was like to be haunted by the ghost of a self one wished to be, but only half-sensed. Sometimes her words both thrilled me and made me weep.

I get a feeling that American standards are sort of an unspoken norm, and that whether one resists them, or whether one adopts them, they are there to be reckoned with

The subject of revolution is ourselves, is our lives.