All quotes

Just to touch the lichened bark of a tree, or the end of a spray projecting over the path as I walked, seemed to repeat the same prayer in me.

I know that peace does not come through wishing for it--that there is no substitute for days and even years of patient and prolonged diplomacy.

The American dream does not come to those who fall asleep.

The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.

We cannot expect to make everyone our friend, but we can try to make no one our enemy.

We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another--until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.

Let us measure what we will do for others by what they will do for themselves.

Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity. Pride is the burden of a foolish person.

Above all, he must guard and you must guard him against indolence. Make him a strenuous man. I had to force myself into being strenuous as you know--had always an inclination to be idle.

A hopeless feeling descends on one and is hard to fight off.

The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.

with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact

Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters.

While the Constitution diffuses power the better to secure liberty, it also contemplates that practice will integrate the dispersed powers into a workable government.

Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties.

Noble disappointment, noble self-denial, are not to be admired, not even to be pardoned, if they bring bitterness.

There is no cutting of the Gordian knots of life; each must be smilingly unravelled.

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality

Most men, when they repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness of that repentance.

The length of man's life, which is endless to the brave and busy, is scorned by his ambitious thought.

To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.

Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world.

All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands: seeking for that bird and hearing him.