To render aid to the worthless is sheer waste. Rain does not freshen the Dead Sea, but only enables it to dissolve more salt.

Doubt is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom.

No gun is perfectly true. So the marksman, that he may hit the bull's-eye, points elsewhere.

A superstition is a premature explanation that overstays its time.

Dumbness and silence are two different things.

Some young folks have wind-fall minds, prematurely detached from the tree of knowledge for a life-long sourness and pettiness.

Nothing cools so fast as undue enthusiasm. Water that has boiled freezes sooner than any other.

Educated folk keep to one another's company too much, leaving other people much like milk skimmed of its cream.

Form may be of more account than substance. A lens of ice will focus a solar beam to a blaze.

When a learner, in the fullness of his powers, comes to great truths unstaled by premature familiarity, he rejoices in the lateness of his lessons.

Let truth be a banner big enough to hide the man who holds it up.

Solitary confinement is rock bottom, it’s absolute unfreedom.

Parentage is a very important profession but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interests of the Children.

Mere unbelief in a personal God is no philosophy at all.

Shell estimates that after 2015 supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand.

Exuberance is a gift of grace that allows us to move on, to seek, to love again.

The community of the Giver had achieved at such great price. A community without danger or pain. But also, a community without music, color or art. And books.

... God gave you just one mouth but He gave you two ears, so you should listen twice as much as you speak

I don't think you have to be perfect to be a role model.

I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.

There is no such thing as an accident. What we call by that name is the effect of some cause which we do not see.