Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like all-embracing compassion.

Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.

Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.

There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.

Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.

The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one's sympathy the gloom of somebody else.

Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain; it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.

It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.

The real Tragedy is the tragedy of the man who never in his life braces himself for his one supreme effort-he never stretches to his full capacity, never stands up to his full stature.

Of all the inhabitants of the inferno, none but Lucifer knows that hell is hell, and the secret function of purgatory is to make of heaven an effective reality.

Falsehood often lurks upon the tongue of him, who, by self-praise, seeks to enhance his value in the eyes of others.

This island is a hard place to survive and I fear that it has made everything resistant to the cruel hand of death.

What women want: To be loved, to be listened to, to be desired, to be respected, to be needed, to be trusted, and sometimes, just to be held. What men want: Tickets to the World Series.

No city in the world, not even Athens or Rome, ever played as great a role in the life of a nation for so long a time, as Jerusalem has done in the life of the Jewish people.

When you have nothing to say, sing it.

Changes are not only possible and predictable, but to deny them is to be an accomplice to one's own unnecessary vegetation.

Concentration is a fine antidote to anxiety.

Feels like a midget is hanging from my necklace

Leaders in all spheres who are living with HIV should be encouraged, not coerced, to lead by example and disclose their HIV status.

If the heart stops for more than two minutes, you have massive brain death. There are only two minutes between our conscious world and zero. That's how fragile our consciousness is.

We won't be signing off until the world ends. We'll be on, and we will cover the end of the world, live, and that will be our last event . . . we'll play 'Nearer, My God, to Thee' before we sign off.