“A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.”
“The land was ours before we were the land s. She was our land more than a hundred years before we were her people.”
“The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.”
“I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.”
“The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended -- and not to take a hint when a hint isn't intended.”
“The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.”
“The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get Up in the morning and does not stop until you get to the office.”
“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.”
“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”
“The first thing I do in the morning is to make my bed and while I am making up my bed I am making up my mind as to what kind of a day I am going to have.”
“And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.”
“They cannot scare me with their empty spaces between stars -- on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home to scare myself with my own desert places.”
“Ah, when to the heart of man was it ever less than a treason to go with the drift of things to yield with a grace to reason and bow and accept at the end of a love or a season.”
“My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.”
“Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with.”
“Two such as you with such a master speed cannot be parted nor be swept away from one another once you are agreed that life is only life forevermore together wing to wing and oar to oar.”
“Friends make pretence of following to the grave but before one is in it, their minds are turned and making the best of their way back to life and living people and things they understand.”
“You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father s. He's more particular. The father is always a Republican towards his son, and his mother's always a Democrat.”
“Why abandon a belief merely because it ceases to be true? Cling to it long enough and... it will turn true again, for so it goes. Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.”
“There is the fear that we shan't prove worthy in the eyes of someone who knows us at least as well as we know ourselves. That is the fear of God. And there is the fear of Man --fear that men won't understand us and we shall be cut of from them.”