“Why shouldn’t we have laws forbidding pornography and obscenity? Many heroic leaders have tried, but they have stumbled over even the definition of the word “obscenity.” If we cannot agree on the length of a foot, it is because we have lost our yardstick.”

“don’t be overly concerned about what other people think of you and your decisions. Most of them are not thinking about you as much as you might imagine that they are anyway.”

“Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”

“Experience has taught me that silence is part of the spiritual discipline of a votary of truth.”

“Half a loaf is better than no bread” 

“the desire and hunger for education is the key to real learning.”

“I've always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.”

“The absence of pain means death, so when something no longer bothers you, you've died to that thing.”

“The darkest night in someone's life may be the brightest day in another person's life. Life rests on perceptions and conceptions or missed perceptions and misconceptions. You can choose to make good things out of every challenging circumstance. In contrast, you can also choose to see nothing in a creative opportunity.”

“Because God is with you all the time, no place is any closer to God than the place where you are right now.”

“Asking and hearing people’s opinions has a greater effect on them than telling them, ‘Good job.’ ”

“Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”

“That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.”

“Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of--something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possesed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalizing glimspes, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the things we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”

“Martin Luther King, Jr. once said that “if a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.”