The world, I soon learned, held a different estimate: and I make no doubt, the world is very right in its view, yet believe also that I am not quite wrong in mine.

Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.

The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality.

Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.

Happiness is the cure—a cheerful mind the preventive: cultivate both.

Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?

. . . if there was a hope of comfort for any moment, the heart or head of no human being in this house could yield it . . .

This little man was of the order of beings who must not be opposed, unless you possessed an all-dominant force sufficient to crush him at once.

I had wanted to compromise with Fate: to escape occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and small pains.

Unfeeling thing that I was, the sensibilities of the maternal heart were Greek and Hebrew to me.

In catalepsy and a dead trance, I studiously held the quick of my nature.

My expectations-which I extended whenever I came close to accomplishing my goals-made it impossible ever to feel satisfied with my success.

No protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country.

Chained in a cell, got my own private hell. Preacher crucifies me, warden wants to fry me.

Heritage does not equal destiny.

Witness your thoughts, moods, and behaviors. They represent your memories of the past, and by witnessing them in the present, you liberate yourself from the past.

To be resigned means to find satisfaction in self-denial (Self-denial is the denial of one's lower self).

If you depend on where the chestnuts are going to be, and where the deer are, you have to be attuned to the outside world.

The process of giving is without limits.

The kernel, the soul - let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances - is plagiarism.

I am actually very in touch with all of my emotions, from joy to pain, and I am free with them.