It takes a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.

Stuff your brain with knowledge.

When a moral man speaks, listen. But when immoral men speak, toss away their words like bad fruit. Truth will never shine from a heart filled with corruption and lies.

Let's stop judging others, and relieve them of the heavy burden they are carrying on their shoulders because of us.

I certainly don’t have any interest in being on a dark veranda with any man except my husband, unlike some women do.” - Esther Norman

I couldn't write a song to save my life. I wouldn't say that I started to panic, but I was definitely getting frustrated. I couldn't even cross a t or dot an i.

The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.

I believe in the brotherhood of man, not merely the brotherhood of white men but the brotherhood of all men before law.

The idea that a good God would send people to a burning hell is utterly damnable to me - the raving of insanity, superstition gone to seed! I want no part of such a God.

Democracy is a constant tension between truth and half-truth and, in the arsenal of truth, there is no greater weapon than fact.

What in Mandela was seen as an almost saintly ability to conciliate could, in a lesser man, be read as weak-kneed populism.