The worst condition of humans is when they lose knowledge and control of themselves.

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.

Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.

Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.

The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.

God entrusts His riches to mature sons and not to spiritual babies.

A journal is a repository for all those fragmentary ideas and odd scraps of information that might otherwise be lost and which some day might lead to more "harmonious compositions."

Spirit slumbers in nature, awakens in mind, and finally recognizes itself as Spirit in the transpersonal domains.

Often if you don't speak up, whatever you thought was stupid to say some man would say and then everyone would say 'as he said'.

We're all pretty ordinary on paper.

At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

There is nothing in life so difficult that it cannot be overcome. This faith can move mountains. It can change people. It can change the world. You can survive all the great storms in your life

There are two things civilized Man should never see being made: Sausages and Laws.

All these practices and struggles to become religious are only negative work, to take off the bars, and open the doors to that perfection which is our birthright, our nature.

Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process.