No matter how insignificant the thing you have to do, do it as well as you can, give it as much of your care and attention as you would give to the thing you regard as most important. For it will be by those small things that you shall be judged.
I use a different style if I'm speaking to a big crowd; I can gin up folks pretty well. But when I'm in these town hall settings, my job is not to throw them a lot of red meat. I want to give them a sense of my thought process.
Give me but a little cheerful company, let me only have the company of the people I love, let me only be where I like and with whom I like, and the devil may take the rest, say I.
Discussion without asperity, sympathy with fusion, gayety unracked by too abundant jests, mental ease in approaching one another; these are the things which give a pleasant smoothness to the rough edge of life.
All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all give and no take.
The very instant I saw you, did My heart fly to your service; there resides To make me slave to it. ...mine unworthiness, that dare not offer What I desire to give, and much less take What I shall die to want.
Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.