“Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.”

The world has no room for cowards.

Every man has a sane spot somewhere.

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

The obscurest epoch is today.

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it.

An elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.

I’ve a grand memory for forgetting.

By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.

Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

It’s a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.

I know that the hard work got me here. And the day I stop working hard, this can all go away.

I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me,

Guys like Larry Bird — he played so hard, he wants everybody else to play hard. That’s not unreasonable. Any coach would want that and demand that.

I want you to take a good, hard look at me, America, because this is exactly what you’ve got coming.

It’s hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don’t want to write.

I think you have to work very hard and dedicate yourself and have the respect of your teammates before you’re about to go out and just try to take a game over by yourself.

The vast majority of the American people are hard-working taxpayers who take responsibility for their families, go to work every day, they pay their mortgage on time, they volunteer in the community.

Life is hard and astonishingly complicated…. No one great reform will make it easy.