A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.

If a man cannot understand the beauty of life, it is probably because life never understood the beauty in him.

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.

The truth is not always beautiful, nor beautiful words the truth.

One must take what nature gives as one finds it.

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.

I used to meditate all the time in bed. That was when I was raising my daughter, and I'd get her up and off to school, and then I would go back to bed and meditate. And then I would do the same in the evening, and that was very good for that period because I had so many things to juggle as a single mother.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

I prefer to praise people and the world rather than criticize them and it.

My mother had bought a sewing machine for me. When I went away to college, she gave me a sewing machine, a typewriter and a suitcase, and my mother made $17 a week working as a maid 12 hours a day, and she did that for me.

I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.

I love the women's movement, and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population.

I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn't in her.

I'm still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.

I think war is so incredibly backward, and I don't think it's intelligent, and it's not sane. So why would you want to support it?

It is better to be beautiful than good, but it is better to be good than ugly.

We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.

Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.