Do not waste a minute - not a second - in trying to demonstrate to others the merits of your performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it.

The first wild-flower of the year is like land after sea.

To be really cosmopolitan a man must be at home even in his own country.

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.

How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no winter in our year!

Great men are rarely isolated mountain-peaks; they are the summits of ranges.

What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, fixed in permanent outline forever?

How much that the world calls selfishness is only generosity with narrow walls,--a too exclusive solicitude to maintain a wife in luxury, or make one's children rich.

There is certainly no defence or water -proof garment against adverse fortune which is, on the whole, so effectual as an habitual sense of humor.

The most fertile soil does not necessarily produce the most abundant harvest. It is the use we make of our faculties which renders them valuable.

Originality is simply a pair of fresh eyes.

Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.

There's no male Oprah.

Most of the music I've listened to or grew up listening to - a lot of it at least - is instrumental stuff.

When you do interviews, you have to talk about yourself - and I like to find out about other people. I am so familiar with everything that I do. Ive said it over and over again. I think it is boring.

Fredrick Buechner kind of loosened up my clerical collar, you might say.

I've not found ! one single mutual fund, one single real estate investment, any gold, silver or anything else that has given me higher returns than: me investing in myself.

Who has suffered? The families of the dead, no doubt. But a greater loss was inflicted on Pakistan because, as I said, we lost the pillars of our society.

I am afraid he has one of those terribly weak natures that are susceptible to influence.

I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.

You know what's weird, I just write to write, with no intention, I just write.