Power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up.

The darker the night, the brighter the stars, The deeper the grief, the closer is God!

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's.

Intelligence alone is not nearly enough when it comes to acting wisely.

Suffering is part and parcel of extensive intelligence and a feeling heart.

Was it all put into words, or did both understand that they had the same thing at heart and in their minds, so that there was no need to speak of it aloud, and better not to speak of it?

The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.

Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen.

You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid—and I know they are—yet I won't be wiser?

I drink because I wish to multiply my sufferings.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.", The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

Always be good, but be wickedly beautiful.

A kind of Providence keeps us blind to the intensity of suffering so as to keep us sane, until that day when the suffering is our own or that of someone we love beyond imagining.

We were made to be distracted by life, by story.

Jealousy has always been my cross, the weakness and woundedness in me that has most often caused me to feel ugly and unlovable, like the Bad Seed.

Why is Mitt Romney not bragging: 'I covered all these people'? Why can't the Democrats sell the idea, we're trying to make you well? Is that such a hard sale?

Nationalism is a type of insanity in which the boundaries of a land replace God.

Helping others is like helping yourself.

It is not the hours of practice that matter...it's what you put into the hours that counts.

To me, part of being an emcee is dedicated to speaking out about what's going on around us.