it is when you are really living in the present-working, thinking, lost, absorbed in something you care about very much, that you are living spiritually.

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 tragedy of bold, forthright, industrious people is that they act so continuously without much thinking, that it becomes dry and empty.

When you will, make a resolution, set your jaw, you are expressing an imaginative fear that you won't do the thing. If you knew you would do the thing, you would smile happily and set about it. And this fear (since the imagination is always creative) comes about presently and you slide down into the complete slump of several weeks or years - the very thing you dreaded and set your jaw against.

There is that American pastime known as "kidding" - with the result that everyone is ashamed and hangdog about showing the slightest enthusiasm or passion or sincere feeling about anything.

Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice? Not to the hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly what to do, but to the listeners; that is, the kindest, least censorious, least bossy people you know. It is because by pouring out your problem to them, you then know what to do about it yourself.