“How do we tell them that one not be discouraged by the imperfection of the world and the inevitability of death and diminishment. How do we tell them when they lose a child, or are crippled, or know that they will themselves die too soon — that God permits pain and sickness and unfairness and evil to exist, only in order to permit us to test our mettle and to earn a fulfillment that would otherwise not be possible?”

“Tell me, warrior, how soon can we do this again?”

“Attention is our first duty whenever we want to know what is our second duty. There is no such cause of confusion and worry about what we ought to do, and how to do it, as our unwillingness to hear what God would tell us on that very point.”

“There are so many little dyings
How do we know which one of them
is death?”

“The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do”

“Frank O'Connor, the Irish writer, tells in one of his books how, as a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside, and when they came to an orchard wall that seemed too high and too doubtful to try and too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took off their hats and tossed them over the wall — and then they had no choice but to follow them.”

“While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.”

“Don't tell us that the only way to teach a child is to spend too much of a year preparing him to fill out a few bubbles on a standardized test; we know that's not true.”

“God gave us faculties for our use; each of them will receive its proper reward. Then do not let us try to charm them to sleep, but permit them to do their work until divinely called to something higher.”

“We call them dumb animals, and so they are, for they cannot tell us how they feel, but they do not suffer less because they have no words.”