Everyone is perfectly willing to learn from unpleasant experience - if only the damage of the first lesson could be repaired.

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.

I can't go on, I'll go on.

One fish in your net is better than a thousand in the ocean.

A desire for truth is by no means a need for certitude and it would be unwise to confuse one with the other.

I want to start where language ends.

Being consumed by what people think of you is the fastest way to forget what God thinks of you.

Therefore 5,000 new video gambling machines costs the economy 5,000 lost jobs each year

I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life.

The music we play has to be tomorrow's, the things we say have to be today, and the reason for bothering is yesterday.

In a rural society communities are "given" for the individual. Community is a fact, whether family or religion, social class or caste.

He had high hopes for society, and though his hopes were too often dashed, he remained a raging optimist.