I don’t wait for moods. You accomplish nothing if you do that. Your mind must know it has got to get down to work.
To find joy in work is to discover the fountain of youth.
There will never cease to be ferment in the world unless people are sure of their food.
For our democracy has been marred by imperialism, and it has been enlightened only by individual and sporadic efforts at freedom.
Food for all is a necessity. Food should not be a merchandise, to be bought and sold as jewels are bought and sold by those who have the money to buy. Food is a human necessity, like water and air, it should be available.
Science and religion, religion and science, put it as it may, they are the two sides of the same glass, through which we see darkly until these two focus together, reveal the truth.
The basic discovery about any people is the discovery of the relationship between its men and its women.
When we know what we want to prove, we go out and find our facts. They are always there.
Euthanasia is a long, smooth-sounding word, and it conceals its danger as long, smooth words do, but the danger is there, nevertheless.
Introversion, at least if extreme, is a sign of mental and spiritual immaturity.
Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that.
There will be no real content among American women unless they are made and kept more ignorant or unless they are given equal opportunity with men to use what they have been taught. And American men will not be really happy until their women are.
You cannot be happy until you understand that life is sad.
We can’t stop time, but it will sometimes stand still for love.
To repay evil with kindness is the proof of a good man; a superior man blames himself, a common man blames others.
But hers was a strange heart, sad in its very nature, and she could never weep and ease it as other women do, for her tears never brought her comfort.
And out of his heaviness there stood out strangely but one clear thought and it was a pain to him, and it was this, that he wished he had not taken the two pearls from O-lan that day when she was washing his clothes at the pool, and he would never bear to see Lotus put them in her ears again.
Well I know I am ugly and cannot be loved –.
I will spend the rest of my life assembling my own mind and my own soul. I will take care of my body carefully, not that it may any more please a man, but because it houses me and therefore I am dependent upon it.
This is I. I am as you see me. I do not care to be otherwise.