A life of peace, purity and refinement leads to a calm and untroubled old age.

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.

And suddenly in the middle of the day a strange feeling grips you. The feeling of missing someone. The warm embrace and the tight hug and the tenderness...

Dancing to the sounds of trees and stones and slow minutes ticking in our hearts and bones.

Stories were primarily verbal to begin with. Before there were cave paintings, stories were told over generations. We tell each other thousands of stories in the course of everyday life.

No reference is truly direct — every reference depends on some kind of coding scheme. It's just a question of how implicit it is.

Lines don't make a beautiful woman less beautiful.

If The Times said it, it was the absolute truth.

When I was at school, I was terrible at algebra and arithmetic, but I was always the best at English and literature. And acting, of course.

Virtue is the truest liberty.

Sitting too long in front of a screen proves both physically and psychologically debilitating, no matter how innocuous or even beneficial the programs may be.

God is more eager to answer than we are to ask.