Agnes Sligh Turnbull

Dogs’ lives are too short. Their only fault, really.

Defeat in itself was part and parcel of the great gambling game of politics. A man who could not accept it and try again was not of the stuff of which leaders are made.

A country-bred man can always learn to get on with city people, but a town-bred fellah never gets the real hang of the country. You can put city polish on a man, but by golly, it seems you can’t ever rub it off him.

If a diplomat says yes, he means perhaps. If he says perhaps he means no. And if he says no, he’s the hell of a diplomat.

There is only one thing about which I shall have no regrets when my life ends. I have savored to the full all the small, daily joys. The bright sunshine on the breakfast table; the smell of the air at dusk; the sound of the clock ticking; the light rains that start gently after midnight; the hour when the family come home; Sunday-evening tea before the fire! I have never missed one moment of beauty, not even taken it for granted. Spring, summer, autumn, or winter. I wish I had failed as little in other ways.

There is still vitality under the winter snow, even though to the casual eye it seems to be dead.

See, I think you live on earth a certain number of times until you finish what it is that you were meant to do here. And then you go on. I don’t think I’ll be back here. I think I’m done.

If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.

We have to face the fact that either all of us are going to die together or we are going to learn to live together, and if we are to live together we have to talk.

The one who cannot restrain their anger will wish undone, what their temper and irritation prompted them to do.

Then I realized that secrecy is actually to the detriment of my own peace of mind and self, and that I could still sustain my belief in privacy and be authentic and transparent at the same time. It was a pretty revelatory moment, and there’s been a liberating force that’s come from it.

Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people to protect themselves from talented people…

As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.

Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

It is one of the beautiful compensations in this life that no one can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.

The best effort of a fine person is felt after we have left their presence.

Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.

A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.

Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.