A mother is not a person to lean on, but a person to make leaning unnecessary.
It is not good for all our wishes to be filled; through sickness we recognize the value of health; through evil, the value of good; through hunger, the value of food; through exertion, the value of rest.
...there are two ways to meet life; you may refuse to care until indifference becomes a habit, a defensive armor, and you are safe - but bored. Or you can care greatly, live greatly, until life breaks you on its wheel.
If we would only give, just once, the same amount of reflection to what we want to get out of life that we give to the question of what to do with a two weeks' vacation, we would be startled at our false standards and the aimless procession of our busy days.
Libraries are the vessels in which the seed corn for the future is stored.
Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.
What a fearfully distracting, perplexing and heart-searching business it is to live.
Freedom is not worth fighting for if it means no more than license for everyone to get as much as he can for himself.
What better can any of us do than to reach for our own stars ... and know which they are?
Life takes hold of us with strong hands and makes us greater than we thought.
What is life, but one long risk?
One of the many things nobody ever tells you about middle age is that it's such a nice change from being young.
perhaps all this modern ferment of what's known as 'social conscience' or 'civic responsibility' isn't a result of the sense of duty, but of the old, old craving for beauty.
The actions of a human being, even of fifteen months of age, may not be without significance to a sympathetic eye.
help that is not positively necessary is a hindrance to a growing organism.
No Vermont town ever let anybody in it starve.
Compared with more emotional types, Vermonters seem to have few passions. But those they have are great and burning. The greatest is their conviction that without freedom human life is not worth living.
there's no such thing as luck. Nothing ever just happens to anybody. ... nothing can really happen to a person till he lets it happen.
one reason we haven't any national art is because we have too much magnificence. All our capacity for admiration is used up on the splendor of palace-like railway stations and hotels. Our national tympanum is so deafened by that blare of sumptuousness that we have no ears for the still, small voice of beauty.
I never heard of anybody who admired the character of sheep. Even the gentlest human personalities in contact with them are annoyed by their lack of brains, courage and initiative, by their extraordinary ability to get themselves into uncomfortable or dangerous situations and then wait in inert helplessness for someone to rescue them.
On New Year's Day every calendar, large and small, has the same number of dates. But we soon learn that the years are of very different lengths.
Vermont is the only place in America where I ever hear thrift spoken of with respect.
History is worth reading when it tells us truly what the attitude toward life was in the past.
If we could learn how to utilize all the intelligence and patent good will children are born with, instead of ignoring much of it - why - there might be enough to go around! There might be enough to solve our alarming human problems, to put an end to poverty, to stop waging wars.
the encounter with death is the great turning-point in the lives of those who live on.
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