Just a glass of beer, a piece of dry bread - and in one moment the brain is stronger, the mind is clearer and the will is firm! Phew, how utterly petty it all is!

The more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.

Being in love doesn't mean loving. You may be in love with a woman and yet hate her.

I am sorry I can say nothing more to console you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in...

You mustn't ask too much of human endurance, one must be merciful.

Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.

To be a Christian - a follower of Jesus Christ - is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom.

It wouldn't do to have all our dreams fulfilled. We would be as good as dead if we had nothing left to dream about.

It's such an interesting world. It wouldn't be half so interesting if we know all about everything, would it?

The question is, of course, is it going to be possible to amalgamate everything, and merely discover that this world represents different aspects of one thing?

What white Americans do not face when they regard a Negro reality - the fact that life is tragic. Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for...

Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no...

As you can see, that leaves almost no time for brooding, lagging, plodding, or procrastinating, and if we stopped to think or laugh, we'd never get nothing done. "You mean you'd never get anything...

Many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible.

How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it?

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind: how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in...

"We're a dramatic people," Perry Mason said slowly. "We're not like the English. The English want dignity and order. We want the dramatic and the spectacular. It's a national craving. We're geared to...

Happiness is an accident of nature, a beautiful and flawless aberration.

For at every stage of your civilizations there are numbers of you who put aside selfishness and dedicate their lives in service to something they see as being greater than themselves. I say you may...

She doesn't believe in dogs, Bridget said. Dogs are hardly an article of faith, Sylvie said.

What a mystery we are to ourselves, even as we go on, learning more, sorting it out a little. The further on we go, the more meaning there is but the less articulable. You live your life, and the...

A plot, whether abandoned by a reader or pursued rapturously, remains itself, and gets where it is headed even if nobody is looking.

He had thought love as a policy made a lot of sense for those who could manage it, and anyone who could manage it belonged in religious life. The rest of us have to struggle with more ordinary love,...

What more does one ask of life, really, but to stagger from moment to moment with a reason to wake and wait for the next reason to wake?

Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or...

I have tried, of course, to be faithful to the evidence. Yet evidence is not truth. It is only evident.

People are supposed to fear the unknown, but ignorance is bliss when knowledge is so damn frightening.

Blessed are the idiots, for they are happiest people on earth.