"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

"The history of the world suggests that without love of God there is little likelihood of a love for man that does not become corrupt."
— Francois Fenelon

". . . I would have let him go one finger at a time, until, without his realizing, he'd be floating without me. And then I thought, perhaps that is what it means to be a [parent] - to teach your child to live without you."
— excerpted from The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss

"She was at that modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called having a fancy for. It occurs once in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will."
— Thomas Hardy (The Return of the Native)

"Grace is the face that love wears when it meets imperfection."
— Joseph R. Cooke

"I am not a well educated man except that I have educated myself, and,
because I have educated myself, what I say will not stand up, for lack of recognized authority. This in turn leaves me free to say what I will, in the hope that, like those small forces that do not threaten empires and are thus not fully pursued, the things in which I believe can survive in some high and forgotten place until the power of empire subsides.
And although I know that few will listen to or credit this, I think we are in a lost age, in which holiness and charity have been traded for the victory and penetration of knowledge, though all the knowledge in the world has not brought us any further than where we can go without it even in the outermost halls of grace. I believe that more is to be known and apprehended from the beauty of a face than in delving, no
matter how deep, simply into how things work, no matter how marvelous that may be. The greatest substance of the world is immaterial, the province of the heart, and its study cannot be forced or reasoned. Merely to touch upon the edge of things in parsing their mechanics is to forswear their fullness, for the entry to this fullness lies not in science but in art. I cannot prove this, for it cannot be proven, but I claim, assert, and have seen it."
— Mark Helprin

"But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it."
— G.K. Chesterton

"No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete."
— G.K. Chesterton

"You say grace before meals. All right. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink."
— G.K. Chesterton

"How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable."
— G.K. Chesterton (Heretics: The Annotated)

"Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--"
— G.K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday)

"Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another."
— G.K. Chesterton

"One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak."
— G.K. Chesterton

"There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister."
— G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

"The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden."
— G.K. Chesterton

"Among these temperamentally unhappy campers are "reactant" personalities, who focus on what they often wrongly perceive as others' attempts to control them. In one experiment, some of these touchy individuals were asked to think of two people they knew: a bossy sort who advocated hard work and a mellow type who preached la dolce vita. Then, one of the names was flashed before the subjects too briefly to register in their conscious awareness. Next, the subjects were given a task to perform. Those who had been exposed to the hard-driving name performed markedly worse than those exposed to the easygoing name. Even this weak, subliminal attention to an emotional cue that suggested control was enough to get their reactant backs up and cause them to act to their own disadvantage. All relationships involve give-and-take and cooperation, so a person who habitually attends to ordinary requests or suggestions like a bull to a red flag is in for big trouble in both home and workplace."
— Winifred Gallagher

"Reason excludes faith," Alessandro responded, watching the blood-red mite as it made a dash for the rim. "It's deliberately limited. It won't function with the materials of religion. You can come close to proving the existence of God by reason, but you can't do it absolutely. That's because you can't do anything absolutely by reason. That's because reason depends on postulates. Postulates defy proof and yet they are essential to reason. God is a postulate. I don't think God is interested in the verification of His existence, and, therefore, neither am I. Anyway, I have professional reasons to believe. Nature and art pivot faithfully around God. Even dogs know that."
— Mark Helprin

"Words were all he knew; they possessed and overwhelmed him, as if they were a thousand white cats with whom he shared a one-room apartment."
— Mark Helprin

"All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but something that is."
— Mark Helprin (Winter's Tale)

"Perhaps he was a fool, but he thought that if a work were truly great you would only have to read it once and you would be stolen from yourself, desperately moved, changed forever."
— Mark Helprin (A Soldier of the Great War)

"We are all perfect clocks that the Divinity has set to ticking when, even before birth, the heart explodes into its lifelong dance."
— Mark Helprin (Memoir from Antproof Case)

"You believe in entropy, which postulates that all phenomena tend to sink to lower levels of organization and energy, and in evolution, which postulates that the history of life has been just the opposite. People like you credit both theories. It’s de rigueur. Is that reason rational? I say, f*ck off."
— Mark Helprin (A Soldier of the Great War)

"As long as you have life and breath, believe. Believe for those who cannot. Believe even if you have stopped believing. Believe for the sake of the dead, for love, to keep your heart beating, believe. Never give up, never despair, let no mystery confound you into the conclusion that mystery cannot be yours."
— Mark Helprin (A Soldier of the Great War)

"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."
— Willa Cather

"Where there is great love, there are always miracles. "
— Willa Cather

"I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off."
— Willa Cather (O Pioneers!)

"He domesticated and developed the native wild flowers. He had one hill-side solidly clad with that low-growing purple verbena which mats over the hills of New Mexico. It was like a great violet velvet mantle thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes almost pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple—the true Episcopal colour and countless variations of it."
— Willa Cather (Death Comes for the Archbishop)

"There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun."
— Willa Cather (My Antonia)

"That is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great. "
— Willa Cather

"The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern."
— Willa Cather

"Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet."
— Willa Cather

"I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."
— Willa Cather

"Her eye, her ear, were tuning forks, burning glasses, which caught the minutest refraction or echo of a thought or feeling .... She heard a deeper vibration, a kind of composite echo, of all that the writer said, and did not say."
— Willa Cather

"The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young. "
— Willa Cather

"Willa Cather said that she write best when she stopped trying to write and began simply to remember."
— Ralph Keyes (The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear)

"Why blame the dark for being dark? It is far more helpful to ask why the light isn’t as bright as it could be."
— Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith)

"If the gospel isn't good news for everybody, then it isn't good news for anybody. And this is because the most powerful things happen when the church surrenders its desire to convert people and convince them to join. It is when the church gives itself away in radical acts of service and compassion, expecting nothing in return, that the way of Jesus is most vividly put on display. To do this, the church must stop thinking about everybody primarily in categories of in or out, saved or not, believer or nonbeliever. Besides the fact that these terms are offensive to those who are the "un" and "non", they work against Jesus' teachings about how we are to treat each other. Jesus commanded us to love our neighbor, and our neighbor can be anybody. We are all created in the image of God, and we are all sacred, valuable creations of God. Everybody matters. To treat people differently based on who believes what is to fail to respect the image of God in everyone. As the book of James says, "God shows no favoritism." So we don't either."
— Rob Bell

"Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."
— Lewis Carroll

"If you set to work to believe everything, you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind, and then you'll be so weak you won't be able to believe the simplest true things."
— Lewis Carroll

"I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.""
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
— Lewis Carroll (Jabberwocky and Other Poems)

"'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, very gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'
"
— Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

"“If you don't know where you are going, you'll probably end up somewhere else.”"
— Lewis Carroll

"I love the stillness of the wood;
I love the music of the rill:
I love the couch in pensive mod
Upon some silent hill.

Scarce heard, beneath yon arching trees,
The silver-crested ripples pass;
and, like a mimic brook, the breeze
Whispers among the grass.

Here from the world I win release,
Nor scorn of men, nor footstep rude,
Break into mar the holy peace
Of this great solitude.

Here may the silent tears I weep
Lull the vested spirit into rest,
As infants sob themselves to sleep
Upon a mothers breast.

But when the bitter hour is gone,
And the keen throbbing pangs are still,
Oh, sweetest then to couch alone
Upon some silent hill!

To live in joys that once have been,
To put the cold world out of sight,
And deck life's drear and barren scene
With hues of rainbow-light.

For what to man the gift of breath,
If sorrow be his lot below;
If all the day that ends in death
Be dark with clouds of woe?

Shall the poor transport of an hour
Repay long years of sore distress-
The fragrance of a lonely flower
Make glad the wilderness?

Ye golden house of life's young spring,
Of innocence, of love and truth!
Bright, beyond all imagining,
Thou fairy-dream of youth!

I'd give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life's decay,
To be once more a little child
For on bright summers day."
— Lewis Carroll

"Well, when one's lost, I suppose it's good advice to stay where you are until someone finds you."
— Lewis Carroll

"She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it)."
— Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass)

"Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!'"
— Lewis Carroll