Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

Cucumber should be well sliced, dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

Curiosity is one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.

Kindness is in our power, even when fondness is not.

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit.

There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

As a Jew and a journalist I have my privileges, and if one doesn't work I use the other one.

I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box.

Any questions I had about whether a redneck from Oklahoma could become a Brown Classical Philosophy professor ended when I met Tim [Blake Nelson].

Get up every day and try a little harder than the day before.

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.

The Germans believe that, no matter where, they can get by on knowledge alone. Art, however, requires skill.

What you do is your history. What you set in motion is your legacy.

We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small.

Dear parents, have great patience, and forgive from the depths of your heart.

If the imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly great be produced either in Painting or Poetry