Vicious habits are so odious and degrading that they transform the individual who practices them into an incarnate demon.

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.

If you love something, set it free.If it comes back to you, It is yours.If it doesn't, It never was.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

The artist enriches the soul of humanity. The artist delights people with a thousand different shades of feeling.

A woman mixed of such fine elements That were all virtue and religion dead She'd make them newly, being what she was.

No soul is bad enough for a fixed "hell," or good enough for a fixed "heaven," however useful the words may be as pointing to opposite states.

When people ask me about being Swedish, or if there is something I feel connected to, neoclassicism is the thing I bring up.

When your mind is liberated, your heart floods with compassion.

Sweet is war to those who know it not.

Wisdom is a blaze, kindled by a leaping spark.

In America we're in this awful situation, and you know, I hardly get any royalties anymore because music is just stolen from the internet.