Exile is terrible to those who have, as it were, a circumscribed habitation; but not to those who look upon the whole globe but as one city.

Politicians are not born; they are excreted.

Poor is the nation that has no heroes, but poorer still is the nation that having heroes, fails to remember and honor them.

It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others and to forget his own.

Read at every wait; read at all hours; read within leisure; read in times of labor; read as one goes in; read as one goest out. The task of the educated mind is simply put: read to lead.

We learn nothing from history except that we learn nothing from history.

It is not enough to acquire wisdom, it is necessary to employ it.

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

Nothing is more unreliable than the populace, nothing more obscure than human intentions, nothing more deceptive than the whole electoral system.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

But for all of them, regardless of their ability, the responsibility of their education falls to the teacher. And who can fulfill that for every single child? What teacher is capable of that?

When ideas come I write them when they don't come I don't.

I want to know which idea you're going to kill yourself trying to make successful, not which ideas have crossed your idle mind.

I am neither an economist nor a photographer of monuments, and I am not much of a journalist either. What I am trying to do more than anything else is to observe life.

I sometimes don't know what songs are about for several years after I've written them.

Through my illness I learned rejection. I was written off. That was the moment I thought, Okay, game on. No prisoners. Everybody's going down.

He lacks much who has no aptitude for idleness.

I like a good beer. Of course, I'll drink a bad one too. Let no person thirst for lack of real ale! Thank god for long-necked bottles, the angel's remedy.

We say that the truth will make us free. Yes, but that truth is a thousand truths which grow and change.