Agnes Sligh Turnbull

Burning logs can carry on quite a conversation! … Have you ever heard apple wood talking? It’s the most loquacious of all. You really can’t get a word in edgeways.

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.

Do you know that the tendrils of graft and corruption have become mighty interlacing roots so that even men who would like to be honest are tripped and trapped by them?

[On religion:] Wasn’t it invented by man for a kind of solace? It’s as though he had said, ‘I’ll make me a nice comfortable garment to shut out the heat and the cold,’ and then it ends by becoming a strait-jacket.

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.

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

Water is the only drink for a wise man.

So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldnt find honest employment.

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

Wherever work is done, victory is attained.

Obviously, as you grow up, no one’s ever 100 percent proud of every decision that they’ve made, and that’s OK. I think as long as you learn from your mistakes and don’t make them over and over again, you’re on the right path.

The fewer our wants the more we resemble the Gods.

Justice cannot be for one side alone, but must be for both.

Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

Logic is like the sword

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed, or crushed: for prosperity does best discover vice, but adversity does best discover virtue.

I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

We cannot see things that stare us in the face until the hour comes that the mind is ripened.