“In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.”

I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.

I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!

I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.

Obscurity and a competence – that is the life that is best worth living.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been.

The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself out of a stick place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.

An idea is inevitably a coordination. It is a coming together of something that is separate or disorganized or incomplete. With an idea you begin to feel into the nature of that incompleteness.

The complexity of immigration as an issue begins with a basic human trait: we are reluctant to share.

In the beginning, I took on every opportunity because I was so determined to get my name and music out there. You can get your sleep, but honestly, your brain needs a break, too, and so many people forget that.

Repeat a lie often enough and it begins to sound as if it must—or at least might—be so.

Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.

To write a good love letter, you ought to begin without knowing what you mean to say, and to finish without knowing what you have written.

I began to understand that his version of hope reached far beyond mine: It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.