“Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you, --will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, --or to dimini...”

“. . . in no instance has a system in regard to religion been ever established, but for the purpose, as well as with the effect of its being made an instrument of intimidation, corruption, and delus...”

“...the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.”

“Happiness is a very pretty thing to feel, but very dry to talk about.”

“Bodies are real entities. Surfaces and lines are but fictitious entities. A surface without depth, a line without thickness, was never seen by any man; no; nor can any conception be seriously forme...”

“In the mind of all, fiction, in the logical sense, has been the coin of necessity;in that of poets of amusementin that of the priest and the lawyer of mischievous immorality in the shape of mischie...”

“Civilisation and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life.”

“So the next day I asked Dan how is it that Bubba can get killed, and what kind of half assed nature law would allow that. He thought about it for a while, and said, 'Well, I'll tell you, Forrest, a...”

“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.”

“Not a lawyer but carries within him the debris of a poet.”

“If a lawyer, if a teacher, if a bus driver, if they're on $40,000 and they get offered a lot more to go somewhere else, what do you think they're going to do?”

“As a trial lawyer, intelligence is important only in the sense that it allows you to play the game, if you will. Without it, you don't even have a ticket into the competitive arena. But beyond that...”

“As far as I can reckon, a woman can stand absolutely anything under God's heaven that she knows; but she just up and can't stand the littlest, teeniest, no-account sort of thing that she ain't sure...”

“Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.”

“If you just watch a teenager, you see a lot of uncertainty.”