In general, we do well to let an opponent's motives alone. We are seldom just to them. Our own motives on such occasions are often worse than those we assail.

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.

The world is governed by opinion.

Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it.

We smile at the ignorance of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to reach its fruit; but the same blunder is made by every person who is over eager and impatient in the pursuit of pleasure.

Every human being is intended to have a character of his own; to be what no others are, and to do what no other can do.

May your life preach more loudly than your lips.

Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge, and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.

Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost.

All virtue lies in individual action, in inward energy, in self determination. There is no moral worth in being swept away by a crowd even toward the best objective.

It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind's dignity.

Reading brings power to the mind and power brings freedom to the mind. Though you ought to read, read what is noble and worthy of not just your time, but your lifetime!

More pernicious nonsense was never devised by man than treaties of commerce.

The thing that makes you exceptional if you are at all is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.

It seems the only way to write a half decent book is to worry oneself sick on an hourly basis that one is producing a complete disaster.

The bitterest satires and noblest eulogies on married life have come from poets.

Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.

How guilt refined the methods of self-torture, threading the beads of detail into an eternal loop, a rosary to be fingered for a lifetime.

Every phenomenon of nature was a word, - the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas.

No matter how many times you do it, you don't get used to the sadness - for me at least - of coming to the end of a film.

Culture is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency.