Quotes on Ifs

Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.

Take bread away from me, if you wish, take air away, but do not take from me your laughter.

In reading Chesterton, as in reading MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere — "Bibles laid open, millions of surprises," as Herbert says, "fine nets and stratagems." God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.

I don't care if the whole world is against you or teasing you or saying you are not gonna make it. Believe in yourself, no matter what.

To be able to give away riches is mandatory if you wish to possess them. This is the only way that you will be truly rich.

If we do not use great care to mortify our will, there are many things which can deprives us of the holy freedom of spirit that we are seeking in order to fly more freely to our Creator, without always being bogged down with the clay of this earth. Moreover, there can never be solid virtue in a soul that is attached to its own will.

And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

If you are going to be successful, you need to give up the phrase, "I can't" & all of its cousins, such as "I wish I were able to.

This is our special duty, that if anyone specially needs our help, we should give him such help to the utmost of our power.

Life is not about gutting out every situation. It's about identifying opportunity or the lack thereof. If your pride is all that is standing in the way of quitting, quit. The right people won't care and the wrong people don't matter. If you know you're on the right path, persevere though the pain. It will be worth it.

"The true essence of humankind is kindness. There are other qualities which come from education or knowledge, but it is essential, if one wishes to be a genuine human being and impart satisfying meaning to one's existence, to have a good heart."

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Business is what concerns us. If you care about something enough to do something about it, you're in business

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music for the first time, as if I had never heard it before.

No society can exist if respect for the law does not to some extent prevail; but the surest way to have the laws respected is to make them respectable. When law and morality are in contradiction, the citizen finds himself in the cruel dilemma of either losing his moral sense or of losing respect for the law, two evils of which one is as great as the other, and between which it is difficult to choose.

That is the logical tight-rope on which we have to walk if we wish to interpret nature.

When in Gregg v. Georgia the Supreme Court gave its seal of approval to capital punishment, this endorsement was premised on the promise that capital punishment would be administered with fairness and justice. Instead, the promise has become a cruel and empty mockery. If not remedied, the scandalous state of our present system of capital punishment will cast a pall of shame over our society for years to come. We cannot let it continue.

Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.

It was a joy! Words weren't dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.