Anyone who regards poetry as an entertainment, as a 'read, ' commits an anthropological crime, in the first place against himself.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

Geography blended with time equals destiny.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

Business is based on the well-known principle of supply and demand. You want something, the other man has it. The only thing left to settle is the price.

If you're naturally kind, you attract a lot of people you don't like.

The essence of sin is self-will—placing ourselves at the center of our lives instead of Christ.

I wake up every day and I think, 'I'm breathing! It's a good day.'

There have never been so many civil wars as in the Kingdom of Christ.

I wouldn't buy somebody's album on a dare if they called him a musician's musician. I don't write to be a writer's writer. I don't want to be like the little-magazine writer.

I just learn from other people. And I try to get strengths from other people and the things they do, the things they can overcome in their lives.

The virtue of prosperity is temperance; the virtue of adversity is fortitude.

If you are not learning, no one will ever let you down.

Teaching seems to me beyond doubt the greatest of the professions.