I never admired another's fortune so much that I became dissatisfied with my own.

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.

When you think a positive thought, you become positive.

An artistic person taps into the destructive emotional energy of guilt and shame and the longing to love and be loveable and transforms these powerful emotions into a creative force.

People often thought Leopold Auer was Russian because he lived in St. Petersburg so long, almost fifty years.

People ask me if I ever see my father and I say yes, because he puts in the effort. He calls all the time to tell us he's proud of us.

I feel you see every crack and bruise with black and white [pictiures] and color distracts usually from the honesty.

I'm proud of being British, but I think our aristocracy is overrated.

Decency must be an even more exhausting state to maintain than its opposite. Those who succeed seem to need a stupefying amount of sleep.

I think people inspire me the most. If I meet a person who is incredibly complex, and all of a sudden, I start thinking in rhymes, that person could be a muse.

To counter the avoidance of intellectual challenge and responsibility, we must reduce the domination of certainty in education.

Elegance is no longer significant; clothes have to be fun.