John D. MacDonald Quotes

Be patient and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its combining power less commonplace, and its total mental output consequently more important.

People want to be thought of as something other than a source of money. They want to be thought of as creative, thinking people.

Words alone cannot fully convey the realities of the soul or the greatness of the human spirit.

Each man in his way is a treasure.

A man with a soul is not like every other man.

Only a man's character is the real criterion of worth

But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed - because 'Thou mayest.

An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen. He is strong, not to do, but to live; not in his arms, but in his heart; not as an agent, but as a fact.

I try to spend a little bit of time on my knees every day, but it all begins for me with cherishing the dignity, the worth, the value of every human life.

What worth was a man who could not be haunted?

Humanity cannot be degraded by humiliation.

Whenever I get to talk to young girls like me I always say, 'The only difference between you and I is that I know that I'm special and you just don't know that you are yet.'

We don't always choose the best solution but we carry on regardless, trying to remain upright and decent in order to do honor not to the walls or the doors or the windows but to the empty space inside, the space where we worship and venerate what is dearest and most important to us.

I shall die here. Every last inch of me shall perish. Except one. An inch. It's small and it's fragile and it's the only thing in the world worth having. we must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

A lofty sense of independence is, in man, the best privilege of his nature.

I refuse to believe that we're only here to live and die.

In the civil society, the individual is recognized and accepted as more than an abstract statistic or faceless member of some group; rather, he is a unique, spiritual being with a soul and a conscience.

We're more than just our job titles or our list of professional accomplishments.

Nietzsche, driven by the absolute demand of his existential truthfulness, could not abide the bourgeois world, even when its representative had human nobility.

Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put in this world has been put there for a reason and has something to offer.

Every single human being is a unique human being. And, therefore, it's so criminal to do something to that human being, because he or she represents humanity.

A man's worth depends upon the nobility of his aspirations.

I feel my characters are valid, my characters are people, my characters have hope. Hope is the thing that'll take us through.

The world depends upon the small beating in your heart.

Faith is a mockery if it does not teach us that we can build a more complete and beautiful world.