“It is a great comfort to a rambling people to know that somewhere there is a permanent home–perhaps it is the most final of the comforts they ever really know.”

It is defeat that lives on and takes the years to smother.

We know of the poverty about us, of the work and worry, but we know of a degree of freedom, of a stunted beauty.

We have warm open days and sunshine in Carolina. Much is denied us. But we have, we have. And an attitude is more powerful than any circumstance.

We have been told to ask about everything: Will it leave us free?

It was not the goal that really concerned us, the journey was the thing. Who ever reaches any goal? From what journey can we return?

The more comfort becomes your priority, the more contracted you become with fear.

I don’t let any personal views about religion cause me to want to take away something that’s offering the patient comfort.

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.

But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.

Gritty people train at the edge of their comfort zone. They zero in on one narrow aspect of their performance and set a stretch goal to improve it.

I think we ripple on into others, just like a stone puts its ripples into a brook. That, for me, too, is a source of comfort. It kind of, in a sense, negates the sense of total oblivion.

How defeated and restless the child that is not doing something in which it sees a purpose, a meaning! It is by its self-directed activity that the child, as years pass, finds its work, the thing it wants to do and for which it finally is willing to deny itself pleasure, ease, even sleep and comfort.

From morning till night, sounds drift from the kitchen, most of them familiar and comforting. . . . On days when warmth is the most important need of the human heart, the kitchen is the place you can find it; it dries the wet sock, it cools the hot little brain.