“As smart as he was, though, I suspect even FDR didn’t realize that once you created a bureaucracy, it took on a life of its own. It was almost impossible to close down a bureaucracy once it had been created.”

“Although Vasili Andreevich felt quite warm in his two fur coats, especially after struggling in the snow drift, a cold shiver ran down his back on realizing that he must really spend the night where they were.”

“It is not best to swap horses while crossing the river.”

“People believe marriage will make us better.”

“Money is as shy and elusive as the “old time” maiden.”

“It seems that only God can know the truth; it is to Him alone we must appeal, and from Him alone expect mercy.”

“What would this country be without this great land of ours.”

“There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh.”

“Of all machines, the human heart is the most complicated and inexplicable.”

“TRULY, "thoughts are things," and powerful things at that, when they are mixed with definiteness of purpose, persistence, and a BURNING DESIRE for their translation into riches, or other material objects.

“Todo tiene su momento oportuno; hay un tiempo para todo lo que se hace bajo el cielo”

“Prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening.” 

“Obedience unlocks understanding.”

“Until the Good News of Jesus Christ burst onto the human scene, the word love was understood mostly in terms of seeking one’s own advantage. Loving the unlovely was incomprehensible  A loving God reaching down to sinful humans was unthinkable.”

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”