“There’s a responsibility in being a person. It’s more than just taking up space where air would be.”

The final weapon is the brain, all else is supplemental.

I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.

Don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens – The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself.

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.

I am happy to report that in the war between reality and romance, reality is not the stronger.

Maybe the hardest thing in writing is simply to tell the truth about things as we see them.

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

An answer is invariably the parent of a whole family of new questions.

You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.

Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.

Books are the best friends you can have; they inform you, and entertain you, and they don’t talk back.

People are felt rather than seen after the first few moments.

We go lightheartedly on our way, never thinking that by a careless word or two we may have altered the whole course of human lives, for some person will take our advice and use it.

A weapon isn’t good or bad, depends on the person who uses it.

There is no other subject on which the average mind is so much confused as the subject of tolerance and intolerance… Tolerance applies only to persons, but never to principles. Intolerance applies only to principles, but never to persons.

You understand what I’m telling you, Tommy? You have a light inside you, and the only person who gets to decide whether that light shines or not is you.

We are all teachers, or should be. Anyone who relays experience to another person is a teacher. Not to transmit your experience is to betray it.

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

You can’t forget the person who prayed for you because when you were happy yesterday, maybe their prayers were a part of it too.

When getting help with money, whether it is insurance, real estate or investments you should always look for a person with the heart of a teacher, not the heart of a salesman.