The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, and all the sweet serenity of books.

To the body and mind which have been cramped by noxious work or company, nature is medicinal and restores their tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself.

Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect and a sort of violent distortion of their true nature; they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments. Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind.

There is a blurred distinction between loneliness and solitude. Loneliness can be a terrible thing, but solitude is what we're on the earth for. Ultimately, we are born alone and we are alone in our inner consciences in our life and we need to be comfortable with that. The craving for stimulation and the flight from solitude is an escape from what should be a healthy, adjusted life.

Loneliness is conquered only by those who understand the benefits of solitude, the most important of which is quiet reflection. The examined life, the active soul: these alone are of lasting importance in a world of transience and triviality.

Doing our duty is the best way to solve our problems...Each has a duty to pray daily, study the scriptures, repent and serve...Be true to your duty, for it will bring you to God. This is the only way to obtain happiness.

I will take shelter under the broad cover of the wings of the work in which I am engaged. It matters not to me if all hell boils over.

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

This Is Just to Say
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Indeed, when we are unduly impatient with an omniscient God’s timing, we really are suggesting that we know what is best. Strange, isn’t it—we who wear wristwatches seek to counsel Him who oversees cosmic clocks and calendars.