Our children await Christmas presents like politicians getting in election returns: there's the Uncle Fred precinct and the Aunt Ruth district still to come in.

Trouble like the hill ahead straightens out when you advance upon it.

Parents are often so busy with the physical rearing of children that they miss the glory of parenthood just as the grandeur of the trees is lost when raking leaves.

Happiness is not something you get but something you do.

A bachelor is a man who can take a nap on top of a bedspread.

Weather means more when you have a garden. There's nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans.

It is all right to say exactly what you think if you have learned to think exactly.

The way to achieve happiness is to have a high standard for yourself and a medium one for everyone else.

Too often in ironing out trouble someone gets scorched.

No one knows his true character until he has run out of gas, purchased something on the installment plan and raised an adolescent.

Children in a family are like flowers in a bouquet: there's always one determined to face in an opposite direction from the way the arranger desires.

What is the destiny of man, but to fill up the measure of his sufferings, and to drink his allotted cup of bitterness?

The inner self is as distinct from the outer self as heaven is from earth.

Most men are like me. They cannot live in a universe where the most bizarre thought can in one second enter into the realm of reality--where, most often, it does enter, like a knife in a heart.

I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.

I never felt big enough playing Thor. And then people talk about you like you're 9-foot tall and 800 pounds. I'm well aware of the illusion. There's not a second where I go: Yeah, I'm a god.

The foundation of the Buddha's teachings lies in compassion, and the reason for practicing the teachings is to wipe out the persistence of ego, the number-one enemy of compassion.

The greatest slave in a kingdom is generally the king of it.

There is no reason whatsoever to think that Buddhism can compete successfully with the relentless evangelizing of Christianity and Islam. Nor should it try to.

To each person, their own way of death - with dignity.

The heavens are now seen to resemble a luxuriant garden, which contains the greatest variety of productions, in different flourishing beds.