We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the gifted and great role, and the imaginative role.

We are always afraid to start something that we want to make very good, true, and serious.

And the true listener is much more beloved, magnetic than the talker, and he is more effective and learns more and does more good

I readan article by a highly educated man wherein he told with what conscientious pains he had brought up all his children tobe skeptical of everything, never to believe anything in life or religion or their own feelings without submitting it to many rational doubts, to have a persistent, thoroughly skeptical, doubting attitude toward everything.... I think he might as well have taken them out in the backyard and killed them with an ax.

Everyone knows how people who laugh easily create us by their laughter,--making us think of funnier and funnier things.

If only I had a wife!" I used to think, "who could stay home and keep the children happy, why I could support six of them. A cinch.

... the spirit, I think, is a stream, a fountain, and must be continually poured out, for only if it is poured out will more and clearer streams come.