There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.

We may have our private opinions but why should they be a bar to the meeting of hearts?

We really have to understand the person we want to love. If our love is only a will to possess, it is not love. If we only think of ourselves, if we know only our own needs and ignore the needs of the other person, we cannot love.

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

As he was valiant, I honour him. But as he was ambitious, I slew him.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror. They were acts of war.

Men are disturbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Life is relationship, living is relationship. We cannot live if you and I have built a wall around ourselves and just peep over that wall occasionally. Unconsciously, deeply, under the wall, we are related.

I know now that there is no one thing that is true – it is all true.

One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

An enemy generally says and believes what he wishes.

It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.

Talk to a man about himself and he will listen for hours.

The way up and the way down are one and the same.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.

Happiness is within the reach of everyone, rich or poor. Yet comparatively few people are happy. I believe the reason for this is that the majority don’t recognize happiness even when it is within their grasp.

If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That’s not going to happen if you care only about yourself.

We want our marriage to be a triumph, not a tragedy.

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.

It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

So thoroughly and sincerely are we compelled to live, reverencing our life, and denying the possibility of change. This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.

Every man is rich or poor according to the proportion between his desires and his enjoyments.

I would go to the deeps a hundred times to cheer a downcast spirit. It is good for me to have been afflicted, that I might know how to speak a word in season to one that is weary.

I’m convinced of this: Good done anywhere is good done everywhere. For a change, start by speaking to people rather than walking by them like they’re stones that don’t matter. As long as you’re breathing, it’s never too late to do some good.

Love is when the other person’s happiness is more important than your own.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

I can be almost terminally grief-stricken because things are so dire, but at the same time, there’s a real lightheartedness about just the recoverability of life, of how things change, how they’re not the same, ever again.

In fact men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth – often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you cannot get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable.

Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.

Judas betrayed Jesus. Lady Red betrayed John Dillinger. Those things happen.

Few people have the imagination for reality.

If you must speak ill of another, do not speak it, write it in the sand near the water’s edge.

Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.

It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.

A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer’s hand.

Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.

Nobody enjoys the ‚little show about nothing‘ humor more than me, but that is never the way I look at it.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

We enjoy the process far more than the proceeds.

You see, I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across – not to just depict life – or criticize it – but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me, you actually experience the thing. You can’t do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.

When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.

I think I hate cynicism more than anything else. It’s the curse of our age, and I want to avoid it at all costs.

One of the most tragic things I know about human nature is that all of us tend to put off living. We are all dreaming of some magical rose garden over the horizon instead of enjoying the roses that are blooming outside our windows today.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

If I’m in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person’s side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.

War grows out of the desire of the individual to gain advantage at the expense of his fellow man.

I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest – that would be like a blind man willing to see.

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

I mean, I feel like you get more bees with honey. But that doesn’t mean I don’t get frustrated in my life.

I’m not happy all the time, and I wouldn’t want to be because that would make me a shallow person. But I do try to find the good in everybody.

The wise are wise only because they love. The fool are fools only because they think they can understand love.

I have found out in later years that we were very poor, but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.

There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

‚Tis not enough to help the feeble up, but to support them after.

We do not hate as long as we still attach a lesser value, but only when we attach an equal or a greater value.