“Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.”

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.

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.

If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

A friend is a gift you give yourself.

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.

Everyone lives by selling something.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.

Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.

Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?

The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.

The library is my cathedral.

He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.

When you start, the world of publishing seems like a great cathedral citadel of talent, resisting attempts to let you inside.

You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire; you build egos the size of cathedrals; fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse.

Mass production is nothing new. Weren’t cathedrals built through mass production? The pyramids?

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.