If all mankind were suddenly to practice honesty, many thousands of people would be sure to starve.

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.

Live your life. Be happy as you can be, let go of the things that don't matter, and fight.

Devon Hamilton-Zemaitis was a beautiful woman. Being dead didn't change that.

Time waits for no one.

There should be, methinks, as little merit in loving a woman for her beauty as in loving a man for his prosperity; both being equally subject to change.

Many of them had a better time than they ever had in their lives because they were discovering the new freedom - the less you need, the freer you become.

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.

You know, larger-than-life politicians have larger-than-life strengths and larger-than-life weaknesses.

The Biblical story of the creation is an excellent parable of movement. The work of art, too, is above all a process of creation, it is never experienced as a mere product.

My people are poor and I am one of them.

There's something almost perfect in the ugly duckling syndrome. Because a sensitivity is tattooed on a part of you no one else can see but can somehow guess is there.