Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.

The creative adult is the child who has survived.

People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.

The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.

Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I'm going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I'm going to unbuild walls.

I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

All is changed, changed utterlyA terrible beauty is born

A girl should want to look good for herself, not for boys.

Sympathy is something that shouldn't be bestowed on the Yankees. Apparently it angers them.

Just as some plants bear fruit only if they don't shoot up too high, so in practical arts the leaves and flowers of theory must be pruned and the plant kept close to its proper soil- experience.

We have history as a guide, and history suggests that this brand of comprehensive reform ... is a recipe for failure.

[On Napoleon assuming power in France:] The time of Fable is over, the time of History has begun.

I can't prove it, but I'm pretty sure that people gain a selective advantage from believing in things they can't prove.

I was born by the river, in a little tent, and just like the river I've been running ever since.

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.