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 physicist Leo Szilard once announced to his friend Hans Bethe that he was thinking of keeping a diary: 'I don't intend to publish. I am merely going to record the facts for the information of...

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?

At some point in life, we learn our limitations, the distances we can travel and the borders we will never cross. And we go from there.

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...

He is omnipresent not only virtually but also substantially.… In him all things are contained and move, but he does not act on them nor they on him.… He is always and everywhere.… He is all eye,...

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...

There is no one right way to live.

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...

The world may be mean, but people don't have to be, not if they refuse.

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

How like a spoon with a razor edge is human need.

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?

January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester's bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not...

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...