We can't live our lives according to what might have been. We have to live by what is.

If the road is easy, you're likely going the wrong way.

The Wizard's First Rule: People are stupid; given proper motivation almost anyone will believe almost anything.

Knowledge is a weapon. I intend to be formidably armed.

We reap a reward merely in the act of helping others. We never know how, or if, that reward will come back to us. Helping is the reward; none other is needed nor better.

Once you place that crown of liar on your head, you can take it off again, but it leaves a stain for all time.

Charity, if you have the means, is a personal choice, but charity which is expected or compelled is simply a polite word for slavery.

Knowing when to fight is just as important as knowing how.

When the whole world is crazy, it doesn't pay to be sane.

Fate occasionally touches us all in ways we don't always understand.

The light of a new day always chases the shadows of the night away, and shows us that the shape of our fears is only the ghost of our own minds.

In the end it may well be that Britain will be more honoured by the historians for the way she disposed of an empire than for the way in which she acquired it.

I am neither especially clever nor especially gifted. I am only very, very curious.

His eyes look too bright, the way the do in people who are in love, people who are enraged, and people who are completely bonkers.

I always wonder if what I'm wearing will be something that people would compliment, or want to wear. I don't ever get ready just for myself, ever.

Novels tend to end as the Paternoster begins: with the kingdom of God on earth.

There is a banking adage that if it's growing like a weed, it's a good chance that it's a weed.

Neither the intensity of your feelings nor the certainty of your convictions is any assurance that you are right.

The doctrine of the double motion of the earth about its axis and about the sun is false, and entirely contrary to Holy Scripture.

Laziness is the road to progress, but only when it is allied to intelligent thought and high ambition.

Sometimes there is such beauty in awkwardness. There's love and emotion trying to express itself, but at the time, it just ends up being awkward.