“We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.”

Troubles forereckoned are doubly suffered.

The knowledge beyond all other knowledge is the knowledge how to excuse.

It is some compensation for great evils, that they enforce great lessons.

Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.

It is with charity as with money–the more we stand in need of it, the less we have to give away.

Contentment is not happiness. An oyster may be contented. Happiness is compounded of richer elements.

A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.

No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.

Cheerfulness is an offshoot of goodness and of wisdom.

The great obstacle to progress is prejudice.

The lively and mercurial are as open books, with the leaves turned down at the notable passages. Their souls sit at the windows of their eyes, seeing and to be seen.

Words, like cannon balls, should go direct to their mark.

Tearless grief bleeds inwardly.

A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake as by never repeating it.

The method of the enterprising is to plan with audacity and execute with vigor.

How like a railway tunnel is the poor man’s life, with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence.

Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.

To understand your fear is the beginning of really seeing.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.

Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.

I feel intimidated by fashion.

Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.

In such a fearful world, we need a fearless church.