Beavers bred in captivity, inhabiting a concrete pool, will, if given the timber, fatuously go through all the motions of damming an ancestral stream.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets; I shall live long.

The truth is that Oxford is simply a very beautiful city in which it is convenient to segregate a certain number of the young of the nation while they are growing up.

Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.

He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

Beer commercials are so patriotic: Made the American Way. What does that have to do with America? Is that what America stands for? Feeling sluggish and urinating frequently?

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.

Wine is a bride who brings a great dowry to the man who woos her persistently and gracefully.

The line between sacred and secular is man-made.

Those things that inspire, enthuse, and compel you should consume your life.

If we try to obey without faith, we get nowhere. If we try to have faith without obedience, it ends in nothing.

Somedays, if bitterness were a whetstone, I could be sharp as grief.

Before they read words, children are reading pictures.

the truth is seldom found in extremes. Central truths can be revolutionary if put to work.

So long as you are in this world, be not surprised at the existence of sorrows.

That's why I cut my hair so short. It was getting a little gray.

If we're unified, there's nothing we cannot do.

The pieces I am, she gather them and gave them back to me in all the right order.