My precept to all who build, is, that the owner should be an ornament to the house, and not the house to the owner.

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.

One trouble with being efficient is that it makes everybody hate you so.

On ambition, goal setting and competition - it doesn't matter if you lose, but you can't win if you don't play the game.

I still think the best classic meal in New York is a coffee-shop breakfast - you sort of can't skip it.

I don't know what I would do without my smartphone as I am on the go all day.

All things in the natural world symbolize God, yet none of them speak of Him but in broken and imperfect words.

The purpose of art is to bring people into presence.

I create something that means something to me, to the world, and try to do my best. I can't fix everything.

So many people choose silence after the immediate wake of a death out of fear of saying something out of turn or "bringing up bad memories" that bereaved people often feel forgotten.

if you want to achieve immortality, see what you can do about getting yourself turned into a Pentagon program.