Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.

You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.

The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.

A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.

Of all the passions, the only one that seems respectable to me is the passion for food

It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.

There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress.

Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.

Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.

Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing.

Action is the pulse of any good story, but the character is the heart. If the action has no consequence to the character, the story loses heart.

Remember you are the perfect reflector of your mind.

Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be andhe will become as he can and should be.

The mother at thirty with face commencing to display the faint seams of the plan for the second face life had in store for her and which she feared would be her own mother’s

[The Catholic religion] was something I carried with me, never forgot, brought into my music. And it's been in my music ever since.

It is in revolutionary periods that the culmination of previous trends and the beginning of new ones appear.

To make great movies, there is an element of risk. You have to say, 'Well, I am going to make this film, and it is not really a sure thing.'

Then we upon our globe's last verge shall go, And view the ocean leaning on the sky: From thence our rolling Neighbours we shall know, And on the Lunar world securely pry.

Oh, how I like those little mortifications that are seen by nobody, such as rising a quarter of an hour sooner, rising for a little while in the night to pray!

Swaraj is not meant for cowards, but for those who would mount smilingly to the gallows and refuse even to allow their eyes to be bandaged.