John Quotes

There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.

America has tossed its cap over the wall of space.

It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds. A Harvard education and a Yale degree.

I'm glad I was a teacher.

I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.

I don't think the intelligence reports are all that hot. Some days I get more out of the New York Times.

Everything rises and falls on leadership.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

My country has contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.

I will give you a definition of a proud man: he is a man who has neither vanity nor wisdom one filled with hatreds cannot be vain, neither can he be wise.

We can have no progress without change, whether it be basketball or anything else.

I mean, in some cases with libel laws, you know, they can write things about people who have no course of action, because they can't afford to take legal action against them.

How can I go forward when I don't know which way I'm facing?

The better men know the Lord, the better may the eternal truths we learn be applied in our daily lives.

Friendship, as has been said, consists in a full commitment of the will to another person with a view to that person's good.

What people want, mainly, is to be told by some plausible authority that what they are already doing is right. I don't know know of a quicker way to become unpopular than to disagree.

Take away from love the fullness of self surrender, the completeness of personal commitment, and what remains will be a total denial and negation of it.

To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

And I, Nephi, took one of the daughters of Ishmael to wife.' Well Mr. Go-And-Do just went and did!

True freedom, which is full joy, is the complete recognition of law and adaptation to it. Bondage comes from ignorance of law or opposition to it.

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.

We all have our youthful follies, embarassing to recall -- but people somehow find it hard to dismiss as a youthful folly anything that has happened to be a financial success.

There is no try. There is only do.

Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision

There are only certain intervals of time when life of any sort is possible in an expanding universe and we can practise astronomy only during that habitable time interval in cosmic history.

I wish I knew how to quit you, Tumblr.

Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.

Books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.

I preach that odd defiant melancholy that sees the dreadful loneliness of the human soul and the pitiful disaster of human life as ever redeemable and redeemed by compassion, friendship and love.

In forming an estimate of sins, we are often imposed upon by imagining that the more hidden the less heinous they are.

Reading a good book helps us to feel un-alone.

When you study history, you're really studying yourself. Every bit of history I've uncovered about my own family has some remnant in myself.

If you don't interfere with me, I'll always do something really good.

The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.

A great memory does not make a mind, any more than a dictionary is a piece of literature.

Life is more fragile and precious than I can comprehend, but believe me, I'm trying.

All that looks like reality to us is dependent on God. There is creation and Creator, nothing more. And creation gets all its meaning and purpose from God.

The arrangements that couples make in order to maintain civility in the midst of their journey to divorce are often most elaborate when the professed top priority is to protect a child.

There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.

What's the Future? It's a blank sheet of paper, and we draw lines on it, but sometimes our hand is held, and the lines we draw aren't the lines we wanted.

The future lay before him, inevitable but invisible.

It's hard to believe in coincidence, but it's even harder to believe in anything else.

While I meditate on the gulf towards which I travelled, and reflect on my youthful disobedience, for these things I weep, mine eye runneth down with water.

Books—they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.

I am an ordinary sort of fellow, not braver than other people, but I hate to see a good man downed, and that long knife would not be the end of Scudder if I could play the game in his place.

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

We all have to learn to live with our losses, and to use our regrets to spur us on in the future.

Sometimes not much is just enough.