Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

If necessity is the mother of invention, discontent is the father of progress.

Custom governs the world; it is the tyrant of our feelings and our manners and rules the world with the hand of a despot.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

America, the melting pot of the world.

Perhaps, moreover, he whose genius appears deepest and truest excels his fellows in nothing save the knack of expression; he throws out occasionally a lucky hint at truths of which every human soul is profoundly though unutterably conscious.

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.

We pursue that which retreats from us.

Adam ate the apple, and our teeth still ache.

Once the Xerox copier was invented, diplomacy died.

Commemoration of Cecile Isherwood, Founder of the Community of the Resurrection, Grahamstown, South Africa, 1906 The Church has no mission of its own. All we can have by ourselves is a club or a debating society; and our only hope, left to ourselves, is to win as many members for our own club and away from other clubs as we can. And whatever this is, it is not Mission. Mission belongs to God. The Mission was His from the beginning; it is His; it will always be His. He has His purposes from the foundation of the world, and the means to fulfill them; and the only part the Church has in this is obedience -- a share in the eternal and life-giving obedience of the Son of God... And the most terrible judgment on the Church comes when God leaves us to our own devices because He is tired of waiting for our obedience -- leaves us to be the domestic chaplains to a comfortable secular world -- and goes Himself into the wilderness of human need and injustice and pain. This judgment does come on churches and nations, when they forget that God is in command, that He does the choosing.

Prudent people are very happy; 'tis an exceeding fine thing, that's certain, but I was born without it, and shall retain to my day of Death the Humour of saying what I think. - The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortly Montagu.

Feast of François de Sales, Bishop of Geneva, Teacher, 1622 We must not be unjust and require from ourselves what is not in ourselves. Do not desire not to be what you are, but desire to be very well what you are.

The worst thing about work in the house or home is that whatever you do it is destroyed, laid waste or eaten within twenty-four hours.

If you want to win anything-a race, your self, your life-you have to go a little berserk.

They are eloquent who can speak low things acutely, and of great things with dignity, and of moderate things with temper.

A theory is no more like a fact than a photograph is like a person.

Commemoration of Wilfrid, Abbot of Ripon, Bishop of York, Missionary, 709 Commemoration of Elizabeth Fry, Prison Reformer, 1845 Life provides all kinds of astonishingly effective anodynes and narcotics, all of which are nothing but misused gifts of God. But there in hell--that is, beyond a fixed boundary set by God--all the securities and safeguards disappear into thin air. What here is only a tiny flame of secret self-reproach that flickers up occasionally and is quickly smothered, there becomes a scorching fire. What here is no more than a slight ticking sound in our conscience suddenly becomes the trumpet tone of judgment which can no longer be ignored. Lazarus is permitted to see what he believed, but the rich man is compelled to see what he did not believe.

Nothing is thought rare Which is not new, and follow'd; yet we know That what was worn some twenty years ago Comes into grace again.