When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, thehistoric sense.

The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time.

Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.

Educational legislation nowadays is largely in the hands of illiterate people, and the illiterate will take good care that their illiteracy is not made a reproach on them.

There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.

Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done destructive work in the colleges.

Nothing makes people so worthy of compliments as receiving them. One is more delightful for being told one is delightful-just as one is more angry for being told one is angry.

Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.

No fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is the thin millionaires.

All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.

You can bear anything if it is not your fault.

Sometimes I believe that God wants to try me, both now and later on; I must become good through my own efforts, without examples and without good advice.

Either God exists or He doesn't. Either I believe in God or I don't. Of the four possibilities, only one is to my disadvantage. To avoid that possibility, I believe in God.

The circumstances that surround a man's life are not important. How that man responds to those circumstances IS IMPORTANT. His response is the ultimate determining factor between success and failure.

There are times when the only access I have to the truest person that I am is when I'm alone and trying to solve a sentence. It's exciting, even when it's frustrating, even when I can't do it right.

some things are better off back in the past. Where they belong.

Sometimes while you wait for what you think is better, Philomene said, what is good enough slips away.

It used to be a good hotel, but that proves nothing - I used to be a good boy.

How I choose to look at any situation will greatly affect whether I have the power to change it or make matters worse.

There's a fundamental distinction between strategy and operational effectiveness.

So many people spend their lives chasing money and end up as the richest men in the cemetery. I don't want to be like that.