Life and Existence

Every obstacle yields to stern resolve.

The block of granite which was an obstacle on the pathway of the weak, becomes a stepping-stone on the pathway of the strong.

If there are obstacles, the shortest line between two points may be the crooked line.

A novelist is, like all mortals, more fully at home on the surface of the present than in the ooze of the past.

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature’s inexorable imperative.

We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.

We should often feel ashamed of our best actions if the world could see all of the motives which produced them.

We know nothing about motivation. All we can do is write books about it.

All that we do is done with an eye to something else.

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.

The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.

’Tis the mind that makes the body rich.

’Tis the mind that makes the body rich.

Measure your mind’s height by the shade it casts.

Untilled soil, however fertile it may be, will bear thistles and thorns; and so it is with man’s mind.

A man’s face is his autobiography. A woman’s face is her work of fiction.

Each man’s memory is his private literature, and every recollection affects us with something of the penetrative force that belongs to the work of art.

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.

Maturity is a high price to pay for growing up.