Deliberate virtue is never worth much: The virtue of feeling or habit is the thing.

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.

Spring is a time to make up a big bouquet of flowers for someone you love, or are trying to love, or are in love with.

Today, computers help us making the music. It's really a tool.

... people don't know what they are striving for. They waste themselves in senseless thrashing around for the sake of a handful of goods and die without realizing their spiritual wealth.

If women ruled the world and we all got massages, there would be no war.

An unarmed man can only flee from evil, and evil is not overcome by fleeing from it.

Ive been to the White House and had Hilary Clinton push through the crowd to come and meet me. Chelsea Clinton, too.

It is possible to get an education at a university. It has been done; not often.

More often than not, things and people are as they appear.

There's a religious basis to their [Bush and Chaney] kind of conservatism. It's rooted in a kind of fundamentalism. I'm afraid of that. I don't like that idea. I think all extremism is suspect.

A pleasing personality helps you win friends and influence people. Add character to that formula, and keep those friends and maintain that influence.