Lest I keep my complacent way I must remember somewhere out there a person died for me today. As long as there must be war, I ask and I must answer was I worth dying for?
People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.
Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.
The pen is the tongue of the mind.
Nature has always had more force than education.
The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give, for we that live to please, must please to live.
To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as mortals.
Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.
We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents.
He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.
Croesus said to Cambyses; That peace was better than war; because in peace the sons did bury their fathers, but in wars the fathers did bury their sons.
If I cannot brag of knowing something, then I brag of not knowing it; at any rate, brag.
When we direct our thoughts properly, we can control our emotions…
Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
We are all alike, on the inside.
The billiard table is better than the doctor.
The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
Your dreams may have shattered, but that doesn’t mean they are over. They can still be turned into a mosaic of success.
Lilac anemone, paper petals, turning tentatively to face a pale sun opening to reveal a lightness of being, a flash of gold, a fresh resilience, contented silence, the dawn of a new day.
