"To know when to be generous and when firm—that is wisdom."

"learn from the past live in the present plan for the future"

"The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it or to escape what is bad in it but we will escape it only by adding something better to it."

"The best way to see Faith is to shut the eye of Reason."

"There are two words that you should use frequently in your youth: ´sorry´ and ´thank-you´. Use the first one as often as possible, so that on your death bed all that you have to say to your friends is ´thank-you!´."

"When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost."

"How will you know the difficulties of being human, if you are always flying off to blue perfection? Where will you plant your grief seeds? Workers need ground to scrape and hoe, not the sky of unspecified desire."

"Routine feeds the illusion of safety..."

"Your teacher might be a child who takes you by the hand and asks you a question that you hadn't considered before, and your answer to the child is your answer to yourself."

"the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind. No wise man ever acquired his wisdom in any mode but this; nor is it in the nature of human intellect to become wise in any other manner."

"Not only do you become what you think about, but the world also becomes what you think about. Those who think that the world is a dark place are blind to the light that might illuminate their lives. Those who see the light of the world view the dark spots as merely potential light."

"Be first the master of yourself"

"Its more than a simple belief that there is good and that it should fight the evil in the world. It's a personification of Light and Darkness at their most elemental level, as forces that are so absorbed with themselves that one cannot exist without the other though they constantly try to consume one another. One of the earliest repersentations of Light and Darkness was of Light being a massive black bull and Darkness being an enormous white bull."

"If one tries to navigate unknown waters one runs the risk of shipwreck"

"A wise person does at once, what a fool does at last. Both do the same thing; only at different times."

"the best classroom in the world is at the feet of an elderly person."

"Everybody’s gotta learn, nobody’s born knowing."

"A person is a person through other persons.None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are. A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family."

"True wisdom gives the only possible answer at any given moment, and that night, going back to bed was the only possible answer."

"This is what we are like. Collectively as a species, this is our emotional landscape. I met an old lady once, almost 100 years old, and she told me, "There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge? Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief, and suffering."

"It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm if you're going to have to wade through it anyway."

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends,Rough-hew them how we will."