Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

He who understands the wise is wise already.

Man (human life form) is a 'second-hand' quality of the absolute supreme Self (Parmatma, Lord). Man is close to the Lord [absolute supreme Self].

Attitude is that litmus test which differentiates a knower from a doer. Knowers have only the skills

That's the thing you learn about values: they're what people make up to justify what they did.

It was only in a place like Paris where knowing the books someone loved, whether they followed Lévi-Strauss or Sartre, was the yardstick by which to measure them.

We have confused the free with the free and easy.

There's so much power in allegory, to form ideas and learn lessons that you can actually take and apply to real life. I think that's why I originally really loved fantasy and reading.

I expect the audience to come up to my level. I am not interested in compromising my music to make it palatable to an assumed sub-standard mass.

When cheated, wife or husband feels the same.

We did not raise armies for glory or for conquest.

I bear a charmed life, which must not yield To one of woman born.