I cannot say whether things will get better if we change what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.

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.

...there is no map of the soul because we make it up as we go...

If you want to know my personality, look through my bedroom window and see how I act.

If not violently overthrown, expectation can have a power in itself, can invest a place with what literally isn't there.

What Kate wore, whether on the street or the red carpet was much cooler to them than what she modelled. Her paparazzi photos were becoming indistinguishable from her editorials.

They came to know the incorrigible sorrow of all prisoners and exiles, which is to live in company with a memory that serves no purpose.

I think we're here for each other.

What's a star when his most important fan is missing?

Of course, your ideas can be stolen... I used to think it was immoral; now I think of it as a compliment... Ultimately, an idea isn't yours; it's only your take on something.

Computers combine things to make new knowledge at such high speed that we cannot absorb it.

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself.