If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.

The habit of looking to the future and thinking that the whole meaning of the present lies in what it will bring forth is a pernicious one. There can be no value in the whole unless there is value in the parts.

In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.

In all the creative work that I have done, what has come first is a problem, a puzzle involving discomfort.

The opposition of instinct and reason is mainly illusory. Instinct, intuition, or insight is what first leads to the beliefs which subsequent reason confirms or confutes; but the confirmation, where it is possible, consists, in the last analysis, of agreement with other beliefs no less instinctive. Reason is a harmonizing, controlling force rather than a creative one. Even in the most purely logical realms, it is insight that first arrives at what is new.

Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people's.

Neither the Church nor modern public opinion condemns petting, provided it stops short at a certain point.