“The direction of the mind is more important than its progress.”

How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.

Space is the stature of God.

Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love the truth.

The mind conceives with pain, but it brings forth with delight.

All are born to observe order, but few are born to establish it.

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.

Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.

To teach is to learn twice.

Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.

The passions of the young are vices in the old.

Kindness is loving people more than they deserve.

Without the spiritual world the material world is a disheartening enigma.

Logic works, metaphysics contemplates.

The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine – but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

Pandora’s box, but to re-enter life in a richer, more compassionate manner.

I went from five foot eleven to six foot eight, and the more ball I played, the more I caught on to the game.

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just – when all along we knew it wasn’t.

I respect that. I can respect you more by doing that. But don’t smile in my face, shake my hand, and then you don’t really respect me, or want me to be around, or come to your games as the owner of the Clippers.

I’m just more content with myself. Like, if I’ve got something to say, I want to get it off of my chest.

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn “reasonable” and become your enemies.

It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discomforting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never were friends.