Human affairs are so obscure and various that nothing can be clearly known.

Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.

If you keep thinking about what you want to do or what you hope will happen, you don't do it, and it won't happen.

A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit.

By a Carpenter mankind was made, and only by that Carpenter can mankind be remade.

Read first the best books. The important thing for you is not how much you know, but the quality of what you know.

Reflection is a flower of the mind, giving out wholesome fragrance; but revelry is the same flower, when rank and running to seed.

Besides, it happens (how, I cannot tell) that an idea launched like a javelin in proverbial form strikes with sharper point on the hearer's mind and leaves implanted barbs for meditation.

They take unbelievable pleasure in the hideous blast of the hunting horn and baying of the hounds. Dogs dung smells sweet as cinnamon to them.

No Man is wise at all Times, or is without his blind Side.

The majority of the common people loathe war and pray for peace; only a handful of individuals, whose evil joys depend on general misery, desire war.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

There are no new inventions, only new discoveries.

My two kids take a lot of my focus, which I'm grateful for.

The nobler sort of man emphasizes the good qualities in others, and does not accentuate the bad. The inferior does.

I was not a natural. . . . This is the story of becoming . . . the Hard Way.

I still check the weather every day, usually multiple times a day, because I know at a moment's notice, a dream crop can turn into a disaster.

Mortality is very different when you're 20 to when you're 50.

You don't have to be tired and bored. Get interested in something. Get absolutely enthralled in something. Throw yourself into it with abandon.

The way you look for songs, you find yourself looking for little signals and clues about life and how things are.

The few that pray at all pray oft amiss.