-
The only thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.
Best?
-
If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back.
Best?
-
Since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same.
Best?
-
Adversity does teach who your real friends are.
Best?
-
His mother had often said, When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. She had emphasized the corollary of this axiom even more vehemently: when you desired a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.
Best?
-
But pain... seems to me an insufficient reason not to embrace life. Being dead is quite painless. Pain, like time, is going to come on regardless. Question is, what glorious moments can you win from life in addition to the pain?
Best?
-
If you want to catch something, running after it isn't always the best way.
Best?
-
By their essential nature triumphs can't be given. They must be taken, and the worse the odds and the fiercer the resistance, the greater the honor. Victories can't be gifts.
Best?
-
All true wealth is biological.
Best?
-
This sheaf of paper with gaudy cover glued to the spine is not the book. The book is not an object on the table, it is an event in the readers mind.... The book, therefore is only finished when someone reads it.
Best?
-
...tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.
Best?
-
If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?
Best?
-
A tactical retreat is not a bad response to a surprise assault, you know. First you survive. Then you choose your own ground. Then you counterattack.
Best?
-
A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that. Only the use made it mean something.
Best?
-
Honesty is the only way with anyone, when you'll be so close as to be living inside each other's skins.
Best?
-
Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.
Best?
-
Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.
Best?
-
Never... ever suggest they don't have to pay you. What they pay for, they'll value. What they get for free, they'll take for granted, and then demand as a right. Hold them up for all the market will bear.
Best?
-
Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste... years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just... take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard.
Best?
-
You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one.
Best?
-
When you give each other everything, it becomes an even trade. Each wins all.
Best?
-
You have to be careful who you let define your good.
Best?
-
You couldn't be that good and not know it, somewhere in your secret heart, however much you'd been abused into affecting public humility.
Best?
-
The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives.
Best?
-
Some men just aren't cut out for paternity. Better they should realize it before and not after they become responsible for a son.
Best?
