. . . part of the mind's job was to cast doubt on what the heart knew to be true, and the heart, because it had no words, often lost the argument
Marriage is a very good thing, but I think it's a mistake to make a habit out of it.
We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.
Nothing in the world is permanent, and we’re foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we’re still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it.
Throw yourself into the hurly-burly of life. It doesn't matter how many mistakes you make, what unhappiness you have to undergo. It is all your material. . . Don't wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material.
To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.
Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
The present system under the control of the whites trains the Negro to be white and at the same time convinces him of the impropriety or the impossibility of his becoming white. . . the Negros will have no outlet but to go down a blind alley, if the sort of education which they are now receiving is to enable them to find the way out of their present difficulties.
Fear is a terrible thing. It makes you do awful things.
Many of us didn't believe in the image of bin Laden as a wandering Old Man of the Mountains, living on plants and insects in an inhospitable cave somewhere on the porous Pakistan-Afghan border.