A first-rate organizer is never in a hurry. He is never late. He always keeps up his sleeve a margin for the unexpected.

The proper, wise balancing of one's whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.

Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.

As a rule people don't collect books; they let books collect themselves.

To my mind the most poignant mystical exhoration ever written is "Be still and know that I am God."

Every scene, even the commonest, is wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom, and behold it (as it were) for the first time; in its right, authentic colors; without making comparisons. Cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic, who lives each moment by itself and tarnishes by the present no remembrance of the past.

The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.