To preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him.

Love is friendship set on fire.

He that loves not his wife and children feeds a lioness at home, and broods a nest of sorrows.

God hath given to man a short time here upon earth, and yet upon this short time eternity depends.

Revenge... is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion.

All virtuous women, like tortoises, carry their house on their heads, and their chappel in their heart, and their danger in their eye, and their souls in their hands, and God in all their actions.

It is impossible for that man to despair who remembers that his Helper is omnipotent.

A celibate, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in a perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity.

It is impossible to make people understand their ignorance, for it requires knowledge to perceive it; and, therefore, he that can perceive it hath it not.

Meditation is the tongue of the soul and the language of our spirit.

God is pleased with no music below so much as with the thanksgiving songs of relieved widows and supported orphans; of rejoicing, comforted, and thankful persons.

Character is what the world needs - character that will empower the mind with such an unimaginable strength that one would meet death face to face and say “some other time, pal!

If people thought more, we'd all have less to amuse us.

I use everything that I pick up in my memory, and everything that vibrates in my soul.

It's my singing that allows me to stand apart.

I dislike helplessness in other people and in myself, and this is by far my greatest fear of illness.

I think that, you know, when we start talking about the Tea Party, people want to marginalize that into some kind of organization or party, but it really isn't.

Nothing's worse than a woman know-it-all.

Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to be eternal and omnipresent and always attractive to kids.

We were not allowed to say, Screw, but we could say, Hump the hostess, because hump is in Shakespeare.

I go running when I have to. When the ice cream truck is doing sixty.