The road to perdition has ever been accompanied by lip service to an ideal.

Great indebtedness does not make men grateful, but vengeful; and if a little charity is not forgotten, it turns into a gnawing worm.

We moralize among ruins.

Philosophy is the highest music.

I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

Christmas is a tonic for our souls. It moves us to think of others rather than of ourselves. It directs our thoughts to giving.

Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.

The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.

Despair is the conclusion of fools.

Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.

Conscience is a mother-in-law whose visit never ends.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.

Too often we… enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.

Obviously I faced the possibility of not returning when first I considered going. Once faced and settled there really wasn’t any good reason to refer to it.

There is so much that people take for granted.

The end of man is action, and not thought, though it be of the noblest.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

It’s the journey of self, I guess. You start with this kind of loner, outside guy, which a lot of people can relate to, and he goes out into the world.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human.

The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month.

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

One always dies too soon or too late. And yet, life is there, finished: the line is drawn, and it must all be added up. You are nothing other than your life.

The power of man has grown in every sphere, except over himself.

In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes; so with present time.

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.

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

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

Make no mistake about why these babies are here – they are here to replace us.

War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives.

I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.

Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.

Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.

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

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.

We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end.

Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure it is in decay.

Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go.

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

I think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore, so do our minutes, hasten to their end.

The truth is you don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. Life is a crazy ride, and nothing is guaranteed.

Wonder is the basis of worship.

‚Pure experience‘ is the name I gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

Our care should not be to have lived long as to have lived enough.

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

There is a time for departure even when there’s no certain place to go.

The end is the beginning of all things, Suppressed and hidden, Awaiting to be released through the rhythm Of pain and pleasure.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.