Whatever we read from intense curiosity gives us the model of how we should always read. Plodding along page after page with an equal attention to each word results in attention to mere words.

The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.

Ideas are the roots of creation.

Ideas are the root of creation.

The object of reflection is invariably the discovery of something satisfying to the mind which was not there at the beginning of the search.

A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers.

Reading, to most people, means an ashamed way of killing time disguised under a dignified name

You can believe in God without believing in immortality, but it is hard to see how anyone can believe in immortality and not believe in God.

Americans cannot realize how many chances for mental improvement they lose by their inveterate habit of keeping six conversations when there are twelve in the room.

Education is the methodical creation of the habit of thinking.

The way of architecture is the quiet voice that underlies it and has guided it from the beginning.

People come into your life and people leave it... you just have to trust that life has a road mapped out for you.

When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to it himself.

I've written a couple screenplays and half-finished plays.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

The cocktail party - as the name itself indicates - was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies.

The voice of flattery affects us after it has ceased, just as after a concert men find some agreeable air ringing in their ears to the exclusion of all serious business.

Nobody should have to be a systems integrator to make a convergence network work in their home

That is not the best sermon which makes the hearers go away talking to one another and praising the speaker, but which makes them go away thoughtful and serious, and hastening to be alone.