“Patience is a most necessary qualification for business; many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request.”

What ever is the natural propensity of a person is hard to overcome. If a dog were made a king, he would still gnaw at his shoes laces.

Muscles come and go; flab lasts.

An indefinable something is to be done, in a way nobody knows how, at a time nobody knows when, that will accomplish nobody knows what.

There is that in the soul of man which must respond to the highest in virtue. It may not respond at once. Human nature can easily be over-faced by examples too remote and austere.

A nation has character only when it is free.

If the distance between ourselves and others becomes too great, we experience isolation and alienation, yet if the proximity to others becomes too close, we feel smothered and trapped.

Beauty, alone, may please, not captivate; if lacking grace, ’tis but a hookless bait.

You have to climb to reach a deep thought.

ho’ you’re tired and weary Still journey on, till you come to your happy abode, Where all you love you’ve been dreaming of Will be there, at the end of the road.

Where would the gardener be if there were no more weeds?

Show me the research, show me the results, show me the conclusions – and then show me some qualified peer reviews of all that.

There are two kinds of pedestrians… the quick and the dead.

The price of power is responsibility for the public good.

There is convincing evidence that the search for solitude is not a luxury but a biological need. Just as humans posses a herding instinct that keeps us close to others most of the time, we also have a conflicting drive to seek out solitude.

Live constructively and live optimistically.

What’s wonderful is to read the different translations – some done in 1600 and some in 1900 – of the same passage. It’s fascinating to watch the same tale repeated in such a different way by two different centuries.

I don’t know why people are so keen to put the details of their private life in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower.

One must be entirely sensitive to the structure of the material that one is handling. One must yield to it in tiny details of execution, perhaps the handling of the surface or grain, and one must master it as a whole.

I don’t have to figure out why or how or when. God has a plan, and I’m committed to it. That commitment frees me from having to worry about the details.

Every new discovery in science brings with it a host of new problems, just as the invention of the automobile brought with it gas stations, roads, garages, mechanics, and a thousand other subsidiary details.

I have a habit of recording records very quickly – and not in a haphazardly way, not in a way where I’m not focused on details, because I’m a freak when it comes to that.

If they are, they can fill in the details even better than I could, just with their imaginations.

It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we’d read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand.

It would be flattering to call it a modern Dirty Harry, but I think this film deals more with the loss of his wife than the traditional revenge vigilante films.