It is a great shame; most of our words are misused tools / which often still smell of the mud in which previous owners / desecrated them.

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.

Life's just a bunch of accidents, connected by one perfect end.

What strange perversity is it that induces a man to set his heart on doing those things which he has not succeeded in and makes him slight those in which his achievement has been respectable.

My dream was always to be on the cover of 'Sports Illustrated.'

Faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from medieval theology.

Better a bald head than none at all.

I stopped predicting the future a long time ago.

Mark my words, my rap career [is] on the rise.

What I know for sure is that the only way to endure the quake is to adjust your stance. You can't avoid the daily tremors. Don't fight them. Just find a different way to stand.

Isis and Horus," he said. "I see you've found new bodies.

It's a battered old suitcase and a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal.