That transformation is to lose everything is an understatement so vast as to be without meaning. One has to lose everything, and one has to lose the one who has lost everything.

Personal improvement is like sitting in a movie theater, arguing with the villain projected on the screen, and feeling that at least we have tried to make things better.

We can continue our quest for improvement or not. We can search for happiness, enlightenment, security or identity or not. The search is not wrong; it is unrelated to the actual world.

The sail, the play of its pulse so like our own lives: so thin and yet so full of life, so noiseless when it labors hardest, so noisy and impatient when least effective.

The fact that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of something does not put existence and non-existence on an even footing.

It is a persistent evil to persecute a man who belongs to the grace of God. It is a calamity without remedy to hate the happy.

It's no good trying to teach people who need to be taught.

God will pardon me. It is His trade.

I remember the last three days that I was president, I never went to bed at all. I never went to bed until we had negotiated the final release of the hostages.

For though there never was so much reading matter put before the public, there was never less actual 'reading' in the truest and highest sense of the term than there is at present.

Silence is terrible and painful only to those who have said all and have nothing more to speak of; but to those who never had anything to say— to them silence is simple and easy.

We need to look at NASA, not as a handout, but as an investment.

I have many times been praised for my lack of animosity towards the Germans. It's not a philosophical virtue. It's a habit of having my second reactions before the first.