If I haven't anything to write, I am just as anxious to 'take my pen in hand' as though I had a message to deliver, a cause to plead, or a problem to unfold. Nothing but writing rests me; only then do I seem completely myself!

The soul grows into lovely habits as easily as into ugly ones, and the moment a life begins to blossom into beautiful words and deeds, that moment a new standard of conduct is established, and your eager neighbors look to you for a continuous manifestation of the good cheer, the sympathy, the ready wit, the comradeship, or the inspiration, you once showed yourself capable of. Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles.

you can never prove God; you can only find Him!

To let blessed babies go dangling and dawdling without names, for months and months, was enough to ruin them for life.

the habit of generalizing from one particular, that mainstay of the cheap and obvious essayist, has rooted many fictions in the public eye. Nothing, for example can blot from my memory the profound, searching, and exhaustive analysis of a great nation which I learned in my small geography when I was a child, namely, 'The French are a gay and polite people fond of dancing and light wines.

Pictures made in childhood are painted in bright hues.

Every child born into the world is a new thought of God, an ever-fresh and radiant possibility.