Making a living is nothing; the great difficulty is making a point, making a difference-with words.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading.

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

Adversity is a great teacher, but this teacher makes us pay dearly for its instruction; and often the profit we derive, is not worth the price we paid.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.

The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

Sometimes one has the feeling of an almost supernatural character to the shifts and changes in our national mood. They appear beyond the prose of cause and effect.

Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.

When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.

I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.

Be the master of your own thoughts to control your future.

You'll stay with me? Until the very end, said James. They won't be able to see you? asked Harry. We are part of you, said Sirius. Invisible to anyone else.

Well I just figure any man who risks his neck to save a dog's life isn't going to kill someone for gold teeth.

Discover how little you know about the people you know.

Among the defects of the bill [Lord Derby's] which are numerous, one provision is conspicuous by its presence and another by its absence.

One of the things about living in the shadow of a suicide is that everyone involved is going to have some guilt, is going to wonder, 'What could I have done? What could I have said?'

Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Unlike those theists who at least pay lip service to science and scientific method, Johnson is out to convict science of fraud in the court of public opinion.

The slanders of the pen pierce to the heart; they rankle longest in the noblest spirits; they dwell ever present in the mind and render it morbidly sensitive to the most trifling collision.