Hard work should be rewarded by good food.

Having faith in God did not mean sitting back and doing nothing. It meant believing you would find success if you did your best honestly and energetically.

Proportion is the heart of beauty.

When you're thinking, please remember this: excessive pride is a familiar sin, but a man may just as easily frustrate the will of God through excessive humility.

He was nineteen years old, homeless and rootless, with no family and no purpose in life.

Aliena's brother, Richard, sometimes reminded her of her father, with a look or a gesture, and that was when she felt a surge of affection.

It was the study hour. Most of the monks were reading. A few were meditating, an activity that was suspiciously similar to dozing.

A chill December morning dawned, with rags and tatters of mist hanging on the trees like poor people’s washing.

The first casualty of a civil war was justice, Philip had realized.

She was unique: there was something abnormal about her, and it was that abnormal something that made her magnetic.

Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.

What's my age again?

Death is simply a shedding of the physical body, like the butterfly coming out of a cocoon. . . . It's like putting away your winter coat when spring comes.

What drives people to public service is a sense of possibility. If you haven't sensed that possibility you don't get started in the same way, you don't feel you can have an impact.

Never tell anyone that you're writing a book, going on a diet, exercising, taking a course, or quitting smoking. They'll encourage you to death.

One of the truest tests of spiritual maturity is seeing the miraculous in the monotonous.

Retribution is really a stone age concept.

If you compulsively pun you are called a paronomasiac.

A few feet under the ground reigns so profound a silence, and yet so much tumult on the surface!

With every exertion, the best of men can do but a moderate amount of good; but it seems in the power of the most contemptible individual to do incalculable mischief.