Sometimes it seems as if there are more solutions than problems. On closer scrutiny, it turns out that many of today’s problems are a result of yesterday’s solutions.

Littera scripta manet – ‚The written word will remain‘. That’s true, but it won’t be that much comfort to me.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

Consequences are unpitying.

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‚real‘ world.

I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw something back.

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.

My experience is listen, see, feel – and then think about what you change.

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

Before the effect one believes in different causes than one does after the effect.

Anyone who thinks must think of the next war as they would of suicide.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

When I look back on my life as a whole, it is impossible for me not to feel blessed.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

But men must know, that in this theatre of man’s life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

Faith… must be enforced by reason… when faith becomes blind it dies.

It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment.

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

Thirty was so strange for me. I’ve really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.

Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle, Old Age a regret.

I know that the arts are important. I’m not denying that, but I can’t associate myself with all the claptrap that goes on around it.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.

If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?

Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.

These words dropped into my childish mind as if you should accidentally drop a ring into a deep well. I did not think of them much at the time, but there came a day in my life when the ring was fished up out of the well, good as new.

There’s a deceptive sin that can keep us from walking in love: pride. It’s deceptive because when you have pride, you’re usually too proud to admit it. I know this because I used to have teachings on pride and they didn’t sell well.

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.

We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

There have been times that I’ve wept as I’ve gone from city to city and I’ve seen how far people have wandered from God.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity.

Throughout my years in business, I discovered something. I would always ask why you do things. The answers that I would invariably get are: ‚Oh, that’s just the way things are done around here.‘ Nobody knows why they do what they do. Nobody thinks very deeply about things in business.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you’re 16 can mirror the one you have when you’re 26. Life repeats itself.

How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done!

I often advocate that we look at many sides of an issue, walk in someone else’s shoes, and identify and reject false choices.

It is always better to have no ideas than false ones; to believe nothing, than to believe what is wrong.

Twice and thrice over, as they say, good is it to repeat and review what is good.

I’m living in the present, thinking about the past, hoping for the future.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

One can not reflect in streaming water. Only those who know internal peace can give it to others.

It’s still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

There is no such thing as accident; it is fate misnamed.

Solutions are not the answer.

It’s a question of whether we’re going to go forward into the future, or past to the back.

Every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and justification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

I think a lot of things that are the norm, that are very systematic, don’t work.

Nothing has been purchased more dearly than the little bit of reason and sense of freedom which now constitutes our pride.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

The solutions to our problems are and always will be based upon universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society throughout history.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

Sometimes we look back and 10 years from now we think, ‚Boy, those were great old days.‘ Well, you know, we’re living in the good old days.

Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.

O love, if I regret the age when one savors you, it is not for the hour of pleasure, but for the one that follows it.