Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

He who understands the wise is wise already.

Fashion and music are the same, because music express its period too.

The truth can be known or realized but cannot be change or modify.

Poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments - its power is not in narrative. I'm not dealing with facts, I'm dealing with emotion.

When I don't know something, I surround myself with people I can trust to teach me.

It took me a few years to realize that throwing harder wasn't always better.

There are a whole variety of reasons I want to be attorney general, a whole variety of things that I do as attorney general that go beyond national security.

But like infection is the petty thought: it creeps and hides, and wants to be nowhere--until the whole body is decayed and withered by the petty infection... Thus spoke Zarathustra.

We must risk going too far to discover just how far we can go.

You look a certain way because you want people to listen to you in a certain way.

When a Christian stops growing, help is needed. If you are the same Christian you were a few months ago, be careful.