To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.
You can take away my wife, you can take away my children, you can strip me of my clothes and my freedom, but there is one thing no person can ever take away from me – and that is my freedom to choose how I will react to what happens to me!
Man’s search for meaning is the chief motivation of his life.
Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.
I am large, I contain multitudes.
Never underestimate the power of dreams and the influence of the human spirit. We are all the same in this notion: The potential for greatness lives within each of us.
We only get one planet.
The more civilized man becomes, the more he needs and craves a great background of forest wildness, to which he may return like a contrite prodigal from the husks of an artificial life.
Men stumble over pebbles, never over mountains.
Science has never drummed up quite as effective a tranquilizing agent as a sunny spring day.
Kindness, quite simply, is the rent we must pay for the space we occupy on this planet.
Man is worse than an animal when he is an animal.
Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people.
You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always To be Blest.
Hope springs eternal.
Let Nature be your teacher.
I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills When all at once I saw a crowd A host of golden daffodils Beside the lake beneath the trees Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Knowing that Nature never did betray the heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege, through all the years of this our life, to lead from joy to joy.