A bad memory is the mother of invention.

Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death.

Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.

Those who have money think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know it is money.

Wisdom is keeping a sense of fallibility of all our views and opinions.

We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.

In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.

We confess our bad qualities to others out of fear of appearing naive or ridiculous by not being aware of them.

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.

The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.

Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.

The man who fears losing has already lost.

A revolution simply means great change, significant change, and that's how I'm defining it - great change for the better, brought about through non-violent means.

Make music that you truly enjoy and it shows.

The world must know what happened, and never forget.

The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.

As an apple is not in any proper sense an apple until it is ripe, so a human being is not in any proper sense a human being until he is educated.

This strong sense of who I am that I've always had, since I was very young, is what makes me write.

By 2030 over 2 billion jobs will disappear.

Snakes are just very instinctive to me. I've been playing with snakes since before I could walk. It doesn't matter where or what it is, from the biggest to the most venomous.