I hear Socrates saying that the best seasoning for food is hunger; for drink, thirst.

Politicians are not born; they are excreted.

Poor is the nation that has no heroes, but poorer still is the nation that having heroes, fails to remember and honor them.

It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own.

Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goest out. The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead.

We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history.

It is not enough to acquire wisdom, it is necessary to employ it.

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

Nothing is more unreliable than the populace, nothing more obscure than human intentions, nothing more deceptive than the whole electoral system.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

To live your life in the fear of losing it is to lose the point of life.

It is the last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe, but it is a claim from which I will not recede and which, God willing, I will make good.

The true definition of madness is repeating the same action, over and over, hoping for a different result.

I've never thought of myself as a hoity-toity cultural critic.

You're only as good as your last record.

The gospel is not weight, it is wings. It carries us.

John Coltrane, he talks to god. He starts playing his solo, he might play for 14 minutes. For 14 minutes, it seems like he's talking to god, but he always takes a hold of the melody.

He was not bone and feather but a perfect idea of freedom and flight, limited by nothing at all

Now that the steam engine rules the world, a title is an absurdity, still I am all dressed up in this title. It will crush me if Ido not support it. The title attracts attention to myself.

It is the peculiarity of grief to bring out the childish side of man.