After all, is our idea of God anything more than personified incomprehensibility?

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

He who understands the wise is wise already.

Nothing is impossible, but no one is perfect to make it possible.

God always has fresh ideas

I am only an average man but by George I work harder at it than the average man.

Let the parent ask "Why?" and the child produce the answer, if he can. After he has turned the matter over in his mind, there is no harm in telling him - and he will remember it - the reason why.

As soon as we are shown the existence of something old in a new thing, we are pacified.

Fortunately for children, the uncertainties of the present always give way to the enchanted possibilities of the future.

You can't overthink the music. Mood and intensity can't be manufactured. The blues isn't about structure; it's what you bring to it. The spontaneity of capturing a specific moment is what drives it.

Living in L.A., I was completely lost - and I enjoyed it.

Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?

Do not draw before you paint, it will restrict your brush.