The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.

For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.

If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a wandering to find home, why should we not look forward to the arrival?

The proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gifts...Thus a heavy task is laid upon Gift-love. It must work toward its own abdication. We must aim at making ourselves superfluous. The hour when we can say 'They need me no longer' should be our reward. But the instinct, simply in its own nature, has no power to fulfill this law.

Delight is incomplete until it is expressed.

And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.

He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.