“Doing leads more surely to talking than talking to doing.”

The groundhog is like most other prophets; it delivers its prediction and then disappears.

Do not believe a thing because you read it in a book! Do not believe a thing because another has said it so! Find out the truth for yourself.

It turns out there’s only one thing that capuchins really, really love – and that’s sweet stuff. If you give them a big vat of say, marshmallow fluff, and you let them go at it.

What a pity that the only way to heaven is in a hearse.

The wolf changes his coat, but not his disposition.

In the electronic age, books, words and reading are not likely to remain sufficiently authoritative and central to knowledge to justify literature.

The SPR is intended to provide relief at times when working families are struggling to make ends meet, and to counter the price shocks that accompany severe supply disruptions. Now is undoubtedly such a time.

On the neck of a giraffe a flea begins to believe in immortality.

And this has had a strong tendency to dampen serious discussion of theological issues in most groups, and hence to strengthen the general anti-intellectual bias.

Virtue, like a dowerless beauty, has more admirers than followers.

Everything pales in comparison to deer.

The wise man realistically accepts as part of life and builds a philosophy to meet them and make the most of them. He lives on the principle of nothing attempted, nothing gained and is resolved that if he fails he is going to fail while trying to succeed.

Men do not mirror themselves in running water; they mirror themselves in still water.

American culture has always known success, not suffering, so we’ve never known what to do with this part of the Bible.

The great soul that sits on the throne of the universe is not, never was, and never will be, in a hurry.

Letters should be easy and natural.

Until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.

One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.

Whether one welcomes or deplores it, nothing is more surely and exactly characteristic of modern times than the irresistible invasion of the human world by technology. Mechanism invading like a tide all the places of the earth and all forms of social activity.

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.

Protectionism will do little to create jobs and if foreigners retaliate, we will surely lose jobs.

There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had

There are many mysteries in old age but the greatest, surely, is this: in those adverts for walk-in bathtubs, why doesn’t all the water gush out when you get in?

I surely think my success at the age of 22 was pretty early!