“Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.”

It is Sunday, mid-morning-Sunday in the living room, Sunday in the kitchen, Sunday in the woodshed, Sunday down the road in the village: I hear the bells, calling me to share God’s grace.

Habitually creative people are prepared to be lucky.

Salutations; it’s just my fancy way of saying hello or good morning

Nationalism has two fatal charms for its devotees: It presupposes local self-sufficiency, which is a pleasant and desirable condition, and it suggests, very subtly, a certain personal superiority by reason of one’s belonging to a place which is definable and familiar, as against a place that is strange, remote.

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar.

Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening, or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.

Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand.

I am still encouraged to go on. I wouldn’t know where else to go.

When you say something, make sure you have said it. The chances of your having said it are only fair.

A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word to paper.

Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college.

There’s no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.

Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together-just the two of you.

The main thing I try to do is write as clearly as I can. I rewrite a good deal to make it clear.

Trust me, Wilbur. People are very gullible. They’ll believe anything they see in print.

People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust.

All the mathematical sciences are founded on relations between physical laws and laws of numbers.

Madame Curie didn’t stumble upon radium by accident. She searched and experimented and sweated and suffered years before she found it. Success rarely is an accident.

We have found a direct correlation between grit and positive emotions, but the fact that I have no evidence that grit is bad for you doesn’t mean it’s not. It’s always a possibility that in the future researchers will discover a downside to grit.

Do I believe in arbitration? I do. But not in arbitration between the lion and the lamb, in which the lamb is in the morning found inside the lion

Truth is a gem that is found at a great depth; whilst on the surface of the world all things are weighed by the false scale of custom.

it would generally be found that he had suffered more from the apprehension of such evils as never happened to him than from those evils which had really befallen him.

He smelt of the sun, as if it had seeped deep into his skin, and I found myself inhaling silently, as if he were something delicious.

There are worse things than a lie… I have found… that it may be well to choose one sin in order that another may be shunned.