“Since we think about ourselves so much of the time, it is comforting to assume … that we really know the score…. [But] this is not an easy assignment.”

Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.

Thwarted lives have the most character-conditioned hate

Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are reversible when exposed to new knowledge.

Reason adapts impulses and beliefs into the real world; rationalization, on the other hand, adapts the concept of reality to the impulses and beliefs of the individual.

A new experience must be redacted into old categories. We cannot handle each event freshly in its own right. If we did so, of what use would past experience be?

Many studies have discovered a close link between prejudice and “patriotism” . . .

If there is a purpose in life at all, there must be a purpose in suffering and in dying. But no man can tell another what this purpose is.

Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.

Reasoning discovers the true cause of our acts, rationalization finds good reasons for justifying our acts.

The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer.

The theist is persuaded that while nothing that contradicts science is likely to be true, still nothing that stops with science can be the whole truth.

An experience associated only once with a bereavement, an accident, or a battle, may become the center of a permanent phobia or complex, not in the least dependent on a recurrence of the original shock.

It takes a major unhappiness, a prolonged and bitter experience, to drive us away from loyalties once formed.

Open-mindedness is considered to be a virtue. But, strictly speaking, it cannot occur.

Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.

We cannot know the young child’s personality by studying his systems of interest, for his attention is as yet too labile, his reactions impulsive, and interests unformed.

I have decided that I won’t take up assignments that don’t interest me.

Holding on to something that has lost its magic, lost its mutual respect, hurts more. Elsa understood the assignment.

A relationship is more of an assignment than a choice. We can walk away from the assignment, but we cannot walk away from the lessons it presents. We stay with a relationship until a lesson is learned, or we simply learn it another way.

We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.

Try your best to make goodness attractive. That’s one of the toughest assignments you’ll ever be given.

Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life; everyone must carry out a concrete assignment that demands fulfillment.

My teacher asked me what I want to be when I grow up, I said happy. She told me I don’t understand the assignment, I told her she doesn’t understand life.

You have a destiny to fulfill. There’s a calling on your life, an assignment that only you can accomplish.