Audacity in wooing is a great virtue, but a man must measure even his virtues.

An author must be nothing if he do not love truth; a barrister must be nothing if he do.

When the ivy has found its tower, when the delicate creeper has found its strong wall, we know how the parasite plants grow and prosper.

Never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. People will take you very much at your own reckoning.

Fame is a skittish jade, more fickle even than Fortune, and apt to shy, and bolt, and plunge away on very trifling causes.

What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?...Was ever anything so civil?

The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

It has now become the doctrine of a large clan of politicians that political honesty is unnecessary, slow, subversive of a man's interests, and incompatible with quick onward movement.

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

A flower that refuses to bloom robs the world of its beauty.

Owning less is better than organizing more.

Prayer is God's answer to our poverty not a power we exercise to obtain an answer.

I'm nothing you can catch now. I am black powder, I am singe, I am the bomb that bursts the night.

I was publishing when I was 20, 21. And it really never stopped.

Can the brain understand the brain? Can it understand the mind? Is it a giant computer, or some other kind of giant machine, or something more?

Part of an actors job, in my opinion, is adjust to the characteristics of the director and try to understand to how he tries to work.

With Hillary Clinton, it's all talk and no action.

There's nothing terribly wrong with The November Man in a serviceable late-night cable TV sort of way but neither is there anything terribly right about it. It's unnecessary and derivative.

The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance.