“The first duty of man is that of subduing fear.”

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.

Without kindness there can be no true joy.

There are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.

If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it.

There can be no acting or doing of any kind till it be recognized that there is a thing to be done; the thing once recognized, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible.

One monster there is in the world, the idle man.

A person who is gifted sees the essential point and leaves the rest as surplus.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-spent one.

Weak eyes are fondest of glittering objects.

Every day that is born into the world comes like a burst of music and rings the whole day through, and you make of it a dance, a dirge, or a life march, as you will.

Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind.

No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, could ever compel the soul of man to believe or to disbelieve: it is his own indefeasible light, that judgment of his; he will reign and believe there by the grace of God alone!

A man lives by believing something.

Naps are a way of traveling painlessly through time into the future.

Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness.

I have irrational fears, and they all go back to losing my father as a kid. I’ve never gotten over it.

All religions are founded on the fear of the many and the cleverness of the few.

I’m still terrified of flying. I really have to get drunk to fly. I’ve found that I’ve developed fears I never had before… fears of heights, claustrophobia only in cities, though, never in the country.

I was walking around trying to act cool, like I had no fear at all. But I was afraid, afraid that somebody would find out just how scared I was. Now I’m finally realizing that fear is the opposite of love.

The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears.

Only the really young are fearless, have the optimism, the romanticism to take unimaginable risks.

When I was a child actor, I had the fear that I was going to be cast as the tree.

True devotion is for itself: not to desire heaven nor to fear hell.