“A man must not deny his manifest abilities, for that is to evade his obligations.”

Some of us might find happiness if we quit struggling so desperately for it.

Business is always interfering with pleasure – but it makes other pleasures possible.

Women lie about their age; men lie about their income.

An invitation to a wedding invokes more trouble than a summons to a police court.

Any man who makes a speech more than six times a year is bound to repeat himself, not because he has little to say, but because he wants applause and the old stuff gets it.

Few of us get anything without working for it.

One of the indictments of civilizations is that happiness and intelligence are so rarely found in the same person.

The best sermon is preached by the minister who has a sermon to preach and not by the man who has to preach a sermon.

Many of our prayers were not answered, and for this we are now grateful.

An idea isn’t worth much until a man is found who has the energy and ability to make it work.

Back of ninety-nine out of one-hundred assertions that a thing cannot be done is nothing, but the unwillingness to do it.

If you’re naturally kind, you attract a lot of people you don’t like.

Plenty of people miss their share of happiness, not because they never found it, but because they didn’t stop to enjoy it.

Something that has always puzzled me all my life is why, when I am in special need of help.

A budget tells us what we can’t afford, but it doesn’t keep us from buying it.

Here is the secret of inspiration: Tell yourself that thousands and tens of thousands of people, not very intelligent and certainly no more intelligent than the rest of us, have mastered problems as difficult as those that now baffle you.

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.

There is no means by which anyone can evade his personal responsibility.

Migrants come up and no longer seek to evade the Border Patrol, but are actually left at the border by their smugglers.

If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is the belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.

We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.

We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.

Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.