“I have known some quite good people who were unhappy, but never an interested person who was unhappy.”

I don’t like authority, at least I don’t like other people’s authority.

It is often wonderful how putting down on paper a clear statement of a case helps one to see, not perhaps the way out, but the way in.

A well begun is half ended.

I expect that all of us get pretty much what we deserve of appreciation.

Do you know the times when one seems to stick fast in circumstances like the fly in the jam-pot? It can’t be helped, and I suppose the best thing to do is to lay in a good store of jam!

The joy of all mysteries is the certainty which comes from their contemplation, that there are many doors yet for the soul to open on her upward and inward way.

I am sure it is one’s duty as a teacher to try to show boys that no opinions, no tastes, no emotions are worth much unless they are one’s own. I suffered acutely as a boy from the lack of being shown this.

Readjusting is a painful process, but most of us need it at one time or another.

The worst sorrows in life are not in its losses and misfortunes, but its fears.

It seems sometimes as if one were powerless to do any more from within to overcome troubles, and that help must come from without.

The moment that any life, however good, stifles you, you may be sure it isn’t your real life.

Congenial labor is the secret of happiness.

A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one’s movements; it should aim rather at giving salient account of some particular episode, a walk, a book, a conversation.

The test of a good letter is a very simple one. If one seems to hear the other person talking as one reads, it is a good letter.

I think I feel rather differently about sympathy to what seems the normal view. I like just to feel it is there, but not always expressed.

When you get to my age life seems little more than one long march to and from the lavatory.

A foreign correspondent, after talking to me for a while, once said: “You don’t seem smart enough to be so good at what you’re doing. Do you have an explanation?”

Unless there is a Good Friday in your life, there can be no Easter Sunday.

There are a lot of bad screenplays so if you write a good screenplay people are going to respond to it.

At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.

The public knows how many good things there are as part of the Affordable Care Act. The Republicans say they’re going to repeal. They don’t know what to replace it with.

Rejoicing in ordinary things is not sentimental or trite. It actually takes guts. Each time we drop our complaints and allow everyday good fortune to inspire us, we enter the warrior’s world.

It has seemed to me that most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been.

What’s good for me is certainly not good for other people.