“I think now that the young man must possess or teach himself, training himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try until it comes right.”

People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.

A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.

A fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he’s already got. He’ll cling to trouble he’s used to before he’ll risk a change.

Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

It’s a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can’t eat for eight hours; he can’t drink for eight hours; he can’t make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.

Success is feminine and like a woman, if you cringe before her, she will override you

No one individual can tell the truth.

Believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.

You can’t beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don’t even try to.

Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.

And sure enough, even waiting will end…if you can just wait long enough.

All l mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings, only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don’t know why either except that the strings are all in one another’s way.

Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

It’s all now you see: tomorrow began yesterday and yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

The marvel of marvels is not that God, in His infinite love, has not elected all this guilty race to be saved, but that He has elected any.

Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

There are infinite reveries, numberless extravagances, and a perpetual train of vanities which pass through both.

Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hands and an infinite scorn in our hearts.

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

I can take the spotlight that shines on me and shift it towards those issues that are infinitely more important than my own issues.

I am always humbled by the infite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.