. . . morbidly, attracted him to strangeness, to recklessnesss, even unhappiness.
[Religion is] the attempt to be in harmony with an unseen order of things.
You can be an artist without visual images, a reader without eyes, a mass of erudition with a bad elementary memory. In almost any subject your passion for the subject will save you. If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich; if you wish to be learned, you will be learned; if you wish to be good, you will be good. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them with exclusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.
I don't sing because I'm happy; I'm happy because I sing.
The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.
The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.
We negotiate with chaos for some sense of satisfaction.
I see something that has to be done and I organize it.
[On Vice-President Henry A. Wallace:] Much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still globaloney.
I refused David Letterman's proposal of marriage for obvious reasons, but thanks for asking.