Agnes Sligh Turnbull

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.

You must learn to drink the cup of life as it comes … without stirring it up from the bottom. That’s where the bitter dregs are!

I think we foreshorten our own viewpoint if we consider any state of mind, or society, or government as final. Growth and change! We can’t get away from them.

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.

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?

I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now? Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.

God is a loving god.

Harmonizing opposites by going back to their source is the distinctive quality of the Zen attitude, the Middle Way: embracing contradictions, making a synthesis of them, achieving balance.

If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.

Methuselah lived to be 969 years old . You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.

Cultivating a close, warmhearted feeling for others is the ultimate source of success in life.

Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.

We can do no great things, only small things with great love.

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us.

Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New.

To understand everything is to forgive everything.

Remembering a wrong is like carrying a burden on the mind.

You’re just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You’ve got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It’s all down to you, mate.

You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave.