In the approach to virtue there are many steps.

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.

The thing with your heart's desire is that your heart doesn't even know what it desires until it turns up.

The thing about opium is that it makes pain or difficulty unimaginable.

If I have to be compared to somebody, it is to Martha Stewart.

That's the chief lesson I have learned: the texture of our universe is one where there is no question at all but that good and laughter and justice will prevail.

The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being.

Foolish, ignorant people indulge in careless lives, whereas a clever man guards his attention as his most precious possession.

If you would take, you must first give.

Rilla was fond of italics, as most girls of fifteen are.

I remember thinking that I'd never show my arms on TV, but over time you loosen up.

No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.