Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them. [Witness for the Prosecution, also published in The Hound of Death and Other Stories.]

A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness - to save oneself trouble.

It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.

Very few of us are what we seem.

Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.

Fear is incomplete knowledge.

Books are a habit-forming drug.

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

Is it not the same distance to God everywhere?

What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.

For a documentary it's so important to find the characters and to find people who will give you access to film

A good company delivers excellent products and services, and a great company does all that and strives to make the world a better place.

To avoid causing terror to living beings, let the disciple refrain from eating meat.

We are born to live, we are born to understand, we are born to carry a cursed pattern and be transformed by pain.

There is no patriotic art and no patriotic science.

While you had the chance to live, did you become your true self?

Give us courage and gaiety and the quient mind . . .

What human beings consciously wish is often quite at variance with the results their reflex patterns automatically create for them.