There are people in the world who aren't necessarily Christians, but they're just naturally nice people who do a lot for other people. Those people will almost always be prosperous people.

To generous souls every task is noble.

We understand and recognize what is good, but we do not labor to bring it to fulfillment, some of us out of laziness, some because we put something else, some pleasure, before virtue--and there are many pleasures in life, long conversations and indolence-that pleasing vice..

In any case you mustn't confuse a single failure with a final defeat.

He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.

We all must try to be good.

She had an air of seeming to wait, as if for a man to get through with something more important than herself, a battle or an operation, during which he must not be hurried or interfered with. When the man had finished she would be waiting, without fret or impatience, somewhere on a highstool, turning the pages of a newspaper.

Nothing any good isn't hard.

Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.

Edith had danced herself into that tired, dreamy state habitual only with débutantes, a state equivalent to the glow of a noble soul after several long highballs.

When some people have a difficult job to do, they give up everything else until that job is finished. Others just give up.

I'm not a complainer. I'm a doer. So if I see something is wrong, then I feel like I have to get in there and try to fix it.