“One must have faith in the best in men and distrust the worst. One must allow the best to be shown so that it reveals and prevails over the worst.”

“The worst men often give the best advice.”

“The best men are not consistent in good—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?”

“I must be fit for a child's glad greeting,
His are eyes that there is no cheating;
He must behold me in every test,
Not at my worst, but my very best;
He must be proud when my life is done
To have men know that he is my son.”

“The secret of alchemy is making the best out of the worst, and not allowing your internal state to be governed by external forces.”

“We've seen the worst that men can do, pa, and been the worst that men can be. But that don't mean that someday we won't see the best, too. And if we can never be perfect after this, well, we can still be pretty good, can't we?”

“To secure approval one must remain within the bounds of conventional mediocrity. Whatever lies beyond, whether it be greater insight and virtue, or greater stolidity and vice, is condemned. The noblest men, like the worst criminals, have been done to death.”

“The best of our fiction is by novelists who allow that it is as good as they can give, and the worst by novelists who maintain that they could do much better if only the public would let them.”

“Strange though this may sound, not knowing where one is going – being lost, being a loser – reveals the greatest possible faith and optimism, as against collective security and collective significance. To believe, one must have lost God; to paint, one must have lost art.”

“The best among our writers are doing their accustomed work of mirroring what is deep in the spirit of our time; if chaos appears in those mirrors, we must have faith that in the future, as always in the past, that chaos will slowly reveal itself as a new aspect of order.”