parents are too apt to mistake inclination for genius.

The sober comfort, all the peace which springs from the large aggregate of little things.

Prayer is not eloquence, but earnestness; not the definition of helplessness, but the feeling of it; not figures of speech, but earnestness of soul.

Forgiveness is the economy of the heart... forgiveness saves the expense of anger, the cost of hatred, the waste of spirits.

A crown! what is it? It is to bear the miseries of a people! To hear their murmurs, feel their discontents, And sink beneath a load of splendid care!

Absence in love is like water upon fire; a little quickens, but much extinguishes it.

No man ever repented of being a Christian on his death bed.

The misfortune is, that religious learning is too often rather considered as an act of the memory than of the heart and affections; as a dry duty, rather than a lively pleasure.

We are apt to mistake our vocation by looking out of the way for occasions to exercise great and rare virtues, and by stepping over the ordinary ones that lie directly in the road before us.

There are only two bad things in this world, sin and bile.

The world does not require so much to be informed as to be reminded.

Sometimes our inability to be Christlike happens because... we don't care. But sometimes it happens because we are naïve about our own hidden darkness.

Nothing is important save the spiritual state that enables one to subjectify one's thoughts to a sensation and to think only of the sensation, all the while searching to express it.

Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.

Hindsight's a wonderful thing. If we all had it there would be no history to write about.

I was to be a photographer and that was that. It did everything for me. I love people. I needed the camera more than ever I would have believed.

To whom much is given, from him much will be required.

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?

In a successful picture book, you always want the voice of the text to match the voice of the art; so that it seems as if the same person writing is the one illustrating and vice versa.

The only safe ruler is he who has learned to obey willingly.