“for a purpose without reason”

“One cannot take a coward on dangerous missions or trust ones fortune to a fool. How then are cowards and fools to be employed?”

“A man who never makes mistakes has long since ceased to do anything new. A man who is always making mistakes is a doomed man with swollen ambitions. But he who judiciously salts success with mistak...”

“He had the beginning of wrinkles and the easy manner of one who has already made his mistakes.”

“Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still t...”

“Contradictions do not perplex the logician. They arise because there are more rules to an open game than can be known.”

“Life is all about practicing for heaven." p 101.”

“The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring -- that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.”

“And because Eddie knew that was only the truth, he said nothing.”

“Self-confidence and self-will are strength for sacred accomplishments.”

“The Lord is my strength.”

“I even made poor Louis take me on Crusade. How's that for blasphemy? I dressed my maids as Amazons and rode bare-breasted halfway to Damascus. Louis had a seizure and I damn near died of windburn.....”