Neither saints nor angels have ever increased my faith in this enigma Life; but what are called ‘common men and women’ have increased it.
Our responsibility to ourselves comes first – because in a sense what one is oneself is the responsibility that one has for others!
When you know a person particularly well, you cannot escape their ruffled feelings.
Taboos on the human heart are more dangerous than any risk we run by using our emotions. Sensation is the life of man; it is his actual energy. To suppress it is to lose creative power!
Knowledge cannot be changed, but the use to which it may be put can very easily be changed.
There is no thermometer for wants!
That a Jew is despised or persecuted is bad for him, of course-but far worse for the Christian who does it-for although persecuted he can remain a good Jew-whereas no Christian who persecutes can possibly remain-if he ever was one-a good Christian.
A blossom must break the sheath it has been sheltered by.
Every hen thinks she has laid the best egg! Can we not all believe as we choose? But the choice of others – what is that to us? Let them alone...
When lightning strikes, the mouse is sometimes burned with the farm.
No emergency excuses you from exercising tolerance.
To be in the right is often an expensive business.
We cannot alter facts, but we can alter our ways of looking at them.
If money had been the way to save the world, Christ himself would have been rich.
If a writer is true to his characters they will give him his plot. Observations must play second fiddle to integrity.
This is the real tragedy of mankind, that until now the spirit of man has not been able to free itself, even along the path of its own development, from the tentacles of self-deception.
There’s nothing final about a mistake, except its being taken as final.
It is a very dangerous thing to have an idea that you will not practice.
To see a shadow and think it is a tree that is a pity; but to see a tree and to think it a shadow can be fatal.
A red-hot belief in eternal glory is probably the best antidote to human panic that there is.