How happily some people would live if they troubled themselves as little about other people's business as about their own.

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.

I would say my dream collaboration would probably have to be with Drake. I think he is an amazing artist.

Well, the manhunt continues for that elusive evil mastermind, but I'm telling you Enron CEO Kenneth Lay remains at large.

I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language.

As for environments, the kingliest being ever born in the flesh lay in a manger.

Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.

I need to go where people are serious about acting.

The conflict in Darfur could escalate to where we're seeing 100,000 victims per month

Music doesn't have to be so rule-based - and so strict in its structures, construction and perception.

A stand-up comedian will never be the life of a party. Instead, he will be the guy who is standing at a corner and observing people.