I forbid you agnostic doubting thoughts to destroy the house of my faith.

What does God the Father look like? Although I've never seen Him I believe - as with the Holy Spirit - He looks like Jesus looked on earth.

Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.

Even in a gleefully negative comic there is optimism although it's slightly hidden: It comes out through a comic character's sheer tenacity. He keeps going and trying to find some sort of fulfillment regardless of his perpetual failure record. That's a form of hope a form of optimism. Really hokey I know but it's true.

To me all war is failure for humanity though it often is a bounty for commerce.

I made a very conscious effort to finish 'The Cypress House' before 'So Cold the River' launched because I thought that would help build a buffer between my writing and any impact that came from either the success or the failure of that first book.

The greatest failure is that although we have created institutions we have not created a civil society.

Thoughtless risks are destructive of course but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.

Failure it is thought is what sells and what people want to hear and read about. I am not so sure.

Los Angeles was an impression of failure of disappointment of despair and of oddly makeshift lives. This is California? I thought.

Before I was married I didn't consider my failure to manage even basic hand tools a feminist inadequacy. I thought it had more to do with being Jewish. The Jews I knew growing up didn't do 'do-it-yourself.' When my father needed to hammer something he generally used his shoe and the only real tool he owned was a pair of needle-nose pliers.

The main reason for the failure of the modern medical science is that it is dealing with results and not causes. Nothing more than the patching up of those attacked and the burying of those who are slain without a thought being given to the real strong hold.

The mere thought of divorce terrified me. To me divorce symbolized failure.

We create success or failure on the course primarily by our thoughts.

I have a tendency to sabotage relationships I have a tendency to sabotage everything. Fear of success fear of failure fear of being afraid. Useless good-for-nothing thoughts.

In high school in sport I had a coach who told me I was much better than I thought I was and would make me do more in a positive sense. He was the first person who taught me not to be afraid of failure.

Greatly begin. Though thou have time but for a line be that sublime. Not failure but low aim is crime.

Creative risk taking is essential to success in any goal where the stakes are high. Thoughtless risks are destructive of course but perhaps even more wasteful is thoughtless caution which prompts inaction and promotes failure to seize opportunity.

Far better is it to dare mighty things to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

The most important training though is to experience life as a writer questioning everything inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that all the other things will come if you don't there's no hope for you.

When you grow up in a family of languages you develop a kind of casual fluency so that languages though differently colored all seem transparent to experience.

Truth be told I'm not an easy man. I can be an entertaining one though it's been my experience that most people don't want to be entertained. They want to be comforted.

Fundamental ideas are not a consequence of experience but a result of the particular constitution and activity of the mind which is independent of all experience in its origin though constantly combined with experience in its exercise.

Although we have in theory abolished human slavery recognized women's rights and stopped child labor we continue to enslave other species who if we simply pay attention show quite clearly that they experience parental love pain and the desire for freedom just as we do.