“Responsibility is the thing people dread the most of all. Yet it is the one thing in the world that develops us, gives us manhood or womanhood fiber.”

“Life gives us clay; it is we to make a pot out of it! But sometimes it gives us pot; it is again we to keep it in one piece, as a pot! All jobs are ours! Life only gives things and it has no other responsibility!”

“We wonder how people can't see the most obvious things about themselves, yet we forget those people are us.”

“Love can make us do dreadful things.”

“Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls- which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make us feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow old, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them, don't you think?”

“Obviously, children die every day, and it is surely conceivable to every one of us that one of our children will pre-decease us. Nevertheless, it is the thing we most fear. It is the thing we in modern medicine devote our greatest energy toward preventing. In modern times, it still seems to most of us that the death of a child is a gross violation of the pact we have with our God. He gives us children. We should, therefore, be allowed to raise them. That is the natural order of the world.”