The bigness of the world is redemption. Despair compresses you into a small space, and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground. To dig deeper into the self, to go underground, is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest.

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

Knowledge has value only insofar as it contributes to the all-round development of the whole nature of man.

I just try to make sure, in everything I do, I do what I'm supposed to be doing in a confident and a humble way at the same time. It's been working for me.

Sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life that he is living, with the thoughts that he is thinking, with the deeds that he is doing, when there is not forever beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger, which he knows that he was meant and made to do because he is the child of God.

One should never be ashamed to cry. Tears are rain on the dust of earth.