An army abroad is of little use unless there are prudent counsels at home. [Lat., Parvi enim sunt foris arma, nisi est consilium domi.]

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.

Time and tide, he thought. The cycle of life. Ending in this, the last twilight. Before the silence of death. He perceived in this a micro-universe, complete.

Some build their castles 'mid thunderbolts and fireworks. My worlds take shape in silence.

And this is one of the major questions of our lives: how we keep boundaries, what permission we have to cross boundaries, and how we do so.

When we seek the gaze of another, it isn't always our partner we're turning away from, but the person we have ourselves become.

You never date someone's ex-boyfriend. Period. That's not even the unspoken rule - that's the spoken rule.

He dispensed starlight to casual moths.

You don't know what it is to live and laugh and love and run a man through! You've never tasted salty air on your tongue or waved heartily at a mermaid!

Kashmir has always been more than a mere place. It has the quality of an experience, or a state of mind, or perhaps an ideal.

Great faith is the product of great fights. Great testimonies are the outcome of great tests. Great triumphs can only come out of great trials.

Power won by crime no one ever yet turned to a good purpose.