The violet is a nun.

The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly.

A woman needs a stronger head than her own for counsel--she should marry.

Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.

Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

Men fear death, as if unquestionably the greatest evil, and yet no man knows that it may not be the greatest good.

I only work to enjoy when I am not working.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

So long as a man confines his ideas of Christ to a rather misty hero figure of long ago who died a tragic death, and so long as his ideas of Christianity are bounded by what he calls the Sermon on the Mount (which he has almost certainly not read in its entirety since he became grown-up), then the living truth never has a chance to touch him. This is plainly what has happened to many otherwise intelligent people. Over the years I have had hundreds of conversations with people, many of them of higher intellectual calibre than my own, who quite obviously had no idea of what Christianity is really about. I was in no case trying to catch them out: I was simply and gently trying to find out what they knew about the New Testament. My conclusion was that they knew virtually nothing. This I find pathetic and somewhat horrifying. It means that the most important Event in human history is politely and quietly bypassed. For it is not as though the evidence had been examined and found unconvincing: it had simply never been examined.

Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good ;consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.

Be true to the best you know. This is your high ideal. If you do your best, you cannot do more.

There are no chaste minds. Minds copulate wherever they meet.

It is the common wonder of all men, how among so many millions of faces there should be none alike.

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the moon, to stare up. I want to be looking at them when they come Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots. I see them already-the pale, star-distance faces. Now they are nothing, they are not even babies. I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods. They will wonder if I was important.

Doeg, though without knowing how or why, Made a still a blundering kind of melody; Spurr'd boldly on, and dash'd through thick and thin, Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in; Free from all meaning whether good or bad, And in one word, heroically mad.

For a righteous man falls seven times, and rises again.

Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.

If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun. -Katharine Hepburn.

No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.

Gather the flowers, but spare the buds.