Sometimes one has the feeling of an almost supernatural character to the shifts and changes in our national mood. They appear beyond the prose of cause and effect.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading.

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

Adversity is a great teacher, but this teacher makes us pay dearly for its instruction; and often the profit we derive, is not worth the price we paid.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.

The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.

When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.

Since films and television have staged everything imaginable before it happens, a true event, taking place in the real world, brings to mind the landscape of films.

What are humans meant to do

Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic.

If it all just happened overnight, you would never learn to believe in what you cannot see.

Justice is the first virtue of those who command, and stops the complaints of those who obey.

The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

A sense of duty imprisons you.

I have a guest house because I don't want people in my home.

Light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful.

in all the world there is not someone who does not believe something.