I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator.

Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.

My father wasn’t perfect. He had a temper. I took some of that. He would snap, but the older he got, he started calming down. He learned about life, but the thing that he taught my whole family was that family was the most important thing and, no matter what, if a family member needs you, you go and help them out; you get there.

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don’t.

Untutored courage is useless in the face of educated bullets.

I know what I believe, I know what I want to do, and I’m just comfortable saying it, and laying it out there.

By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try. The world is beyond the winning.

A lot of truth is said in jest.

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.

What convinces is conviction. Believe in the argument you’re advancing. If you don’t you’re as good as dead. The other person will sense that something isn’t there, and no chain of reasoning, no matter how logical or elegant or brilliant, will win your case for you.

As you get older, time speeds up but life slows down.

All the learnin‘ my father paid for was a bit o‘ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.

I would fain grow old learning many things.

I do not know whether there are gods, but there ought to be.

Who sows virtue reaps honor.

The higher the sun ariseth, the less shadow doth he cast; even so the greater is the goodness, the less doth it covet praise; yet cannot avoid its rewards in honours.

I don’t believe in honors – it bothers me. Honors bother: honors is epaulettes; honors is uniforms. My papa brought me up this way.

The only real failure in life is not to be true to the best one knows.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon.

Genius always gives its best at first; prudence, at last.

I believe in love at first sight. You want that connection, and then you want some problems.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.

Everything in excess is opposed to nature.

I want to know all Gods thoughts; all the rest are just details.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

Nothing fortifies scepticism more than the fact that there are some who are not sceptics; if all were so, they would be wrong.

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of the youth.

Religion is more than life. Remember that his own religion is the truest to every man even if it stands low in the scales of philosophical comparison.

You sort of start thinking anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.

Half a truth is often a great lie.

The wise man does at once what the fool does finally.

Why is it that although it takes us years to get into our messes, we expect God to get us out of them in a few days?

I don’t spend that much time being introspective, believe it or not. All I know is that I grew up not questioning God because that’s how you are. God was there like the birds and the wind.

Love is a better teacher than duty.

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.

If any of you should ask me for an epitome of the Christian religion, I should say that it is in one word – prayer. Live and die without prayer, and you will pray long enough when you get to hell.

A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.

Regrets are the natural property of grey hairs.

I think I’ve got wiser.

You may think it was a very little thing, and in these days it seems to me like a trifle, but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work, I had earned a dollar. I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time.

And I love that even in the toughest moments, when we’re all sweating it – when we’re worried that the bill won’t pass, and it seems like all is lost – Barack never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise. Just like his grandmother, he just keeps getting up and moving forward… with patience and wisdom, and courage and grace.

It doesn’t matter where you come from, what you have or don’t have, what you lack, or what you have too much of. But all you need to have is faith in God, an undying passion for what you do and what you choose to do in this life, and a relentless drive and the will to do whatever it takes to be successful in whatever you put your mind to.

We should take care not to make the intellect our goal; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

If I err in belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error which gives me pleasure to be wrested from me while I live.

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.

There comes a time when the mind takes a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there.