“We who live in quiet places have the opportunity to become acquainted with ourselves, to think our own thoughts and live our own lives in a way that is not possible for those keeping up with the crowd.”

The true way to live is to enjoy every moment as it passes, and surely it is in the everyday things around us that the beauty of life lies.

All those golden autumn days the sky was full of wings. Wings beating low over the blue water of Silver Lake, wings beating high in the blue air far above it bearing them all away to the green fields in the South.

I understood….that in my own life I represented a whole period of American history.

No one has ever achieved anything from the smallest to the greatest unless the dream was dreamed first.

The only stupid thing about words is the spelling of them.

In these days when we feed those who are not hungry, we are stealing from those who are starving, even though the food is our own.

These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves — they’re good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on ’em.

Vices are simply overworked virtues.

Remember well, and bear in mind, a constant friend is hard to find.

Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I’ll remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don’t remember me at all.

If the members of a home are ill-temperered and quarrelsome, how quickly you feel it when you enter the house. You may not know just what is wrong, but you wish to make your visit short.

We heap up around us things that we do not need as the crow makes piles of glittering pebbles.

Far worst of all, the fever had settled in Mary’s eyes, and Mary was blind.

This earthly life is a battle,’ said Ma. ‘If it isn’t one thing to contend with, it’s another. It always has been so, and it always will be. The sooner you make up your mind to that, the better off you are, and more thankful for your pleasures.

When Pa was at home the gun always lay across those two wooden hooks above the door. … The gun was always loaded, and always above the door so that Pa could get it quickly and easily, any time he needed a gun.

These happy golden years are passing by, these happy golden years.

Sometimes people rehabilitate and reform their lives into being a great person when they make awful choices as children.

If you live a life of make-believe, your life isn’t worth anything until you do something that does challenge your reality.

The worst of all fears is the fear of living.

Live the full life of the mind, exhilarated by new ideas, intoxicated by the Romance of the unusual.

It is not death that we wish to avoid, but life that we wish to live.

Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important.

To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as one’s own in the midst of abundance.

Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m alive, I must live and be happy.