“There’s too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.”

Truth, however bitter, can be accepted, and woven into a design for living.

One is alone when the last one who remembers is gone.

The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.

I’m sure you have a theme: the theme of your life. You can embellish it or desecrate it, but it’s your theme, and as long as you follow it, you will experience harmony and peace of mind.

Don’t think. That is the wrong way to bring anything back. Let it go. Sooner or later it will flash into your mind.

It’s what’s in *yourself* that makes you happy or unhappy.

To win a war is as disasterous as to lose one.

Everything that has existed, lingers in the Eternity.

There is no greater mistake in life than seeing things or hearing them at the wrong time.

You don’t realize what fine fighting material there is in age. You show me any one who’s lived to over seventy and you show me a fighter – someone who’s got the will to live.

Assumptions are dangerous things.

But surely for everything you love you have to pay some price.

To every problem, there is a most simple solution.

Until one looks back on one’s own past one fails to realise what an extraordinary view of the world a child has.

The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

Fiction is founded on truth unless things did happen, people couldn’t think of them.

Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he just mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

Piety is the most solid goodness, and the vilest of what is evil is vice.

Solitude is better than the society of evil persons.

All evil is corrective and remedial and is therefore not permanent.

The fact is that men who know nothing of decency in their own lives are only too ready to launch foul slanders against their betters and to offer them up as victims to the evil deity of popular envy.

To be alone is the fate of all great minds – a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils.

Evil exists in the shadows of our world and I’m realizing that without the darkness there would be no light. We need both to stay alive.