Vigorous societies harbor a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications.

No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

If a dog jumps into your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because your lap is warmer.

There are no whole truths: All truths are half-truths.

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.

Religion is the last refuge of human savagery.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

...the self-satisfied dogmatism with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of existing modes of knowledge.

Knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

What is done is done for the love of it- or not really done at all.

Use your own paint

Tragically, many people have this faithless, wishy-washy mindset, which causes them to lose the battle in their minds before they ever fight it in the world.

Man's activity consists in either a making or doing. Both of these aspects of the active life depend for their correction upon the contemplative life (that is, the Hero).

A constitution is the arrangement of magistracies in a state, especially of the highest of all. The government is everywhere sovereign in the state, and the constitution is in fact the government.

Even the Beatles lived their lives as a soap opera.

People like givers, people want to help givers. I get stuff all the time.

The gift derives its value from the rank of the giver.

I probably write the same story a hundred different ways. I suppose right now I am looking for the 101st different way to write that same story. And the 102nd, and 103rd and 111th and 133rd.

I was brought up in Scotland and have always been a country person, although the town means a great deal to me, too.