You can't be suspicious of a tree, or accuse a bird or a squirrel of subversion or challenge the ideology of a violet.

We've entered an era when very good, competent people aren't getting jobs. One remedy is to stand out, to self-promote. If you do, you're going to get the nod over some co-worker.

He calls drunkenness an expression identical with ruin.

One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter. -James Earl Jones.

Get out of my life. (go away).

With mortal crisis doth portend, My days to appropinque an end.

Not till the fire is dying in the grate, Look we for any kinship with the stars. Oh, wisdom never comes when it is gold, And the great price we paid for it full worth: We have it only when we are half earth. Little avails that coinage to the old!

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.

I do now remember the poor creature, small beer. -King Henry IV. Part II. Act ii. Sc. 2.

Talent, like beauty, to be pardoned, must be obscure and unostentatious.

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

I am glad that I paid so little attention to good advice, had I abided by it I might have been saved from some of my most valuable mistakes.

Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

One ought to seek out virtue for its own sake, without being influenced by fear or hope, or by any external influence. Moreover, that in that does happiness consist. -Diogenes Laertius.

God's delays are not God's denials.

Unexplained joy is always so keen that... it seems to hold enough to reconcile one to the inevitable.

I love being married. It's so great to find that one special person you want to annoy for the rest of your life.

Those who talk of reading the Bible "as literature" sometimes mean, I think, reading it without attending to the main thing it is about; like reading Burke with no interest in politics, or reading the Aeneid with no interest in Rome... But there is a saner sense in which the Bible -- since it is, after all, literature -- cannot properly be read except as literature, and the different parts of it as the different sorts of literature they are. Most emphatically, the Psalms must be read as poems -- as lyrics, with all the licenses and all the formalities, the hyperboles, the emotional rather than logical connections, which are proper to lyric poetry... Otherwise we shall miss what is in them and think we see what is not.

A lofty cane, a sword with silver hilt, A ring, two watches, and a snuff box gilt.