The Sonnets of Shakespeare have the fascination of an autobiography, without its clarity. It is like reading an important document in a cave by the light of matches which keep blowing out.

What is politics but persuading the public to vote for this and support that and endure these for the promise of those?

Many people have played themselves to death. Many people have eaten and drunk themselves to death. Nobody ever thought himself to death.

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.

Wherever there are beginners and experts, old and young, there is some kind of learning going on, some kind of teaching. We are all pupils and we are all teachers.

A very wise old teacher once said: I consider a day's teaching wasted if we do not all have one hearty laugh.

A teacher must believe in the value and interest of his subject as a doctor believes in health.

He meant that when people laugh together, they cease to be young and old, master and pupils, jailer and prisoners. They become a single group of human beings enjoying its existence.

The relation between parents and children is essentially based on teaching.

If you do not actually like boys and girls, or young men and young women, give up teaching.

Many of the twisted minds and crippled characters in the world were made by careless parents who kept their children away from knives and fires, but put permanent scars on their souls.

People can say crap. They can think whatever they want, but you control how you feel about it.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say and then to say it with the utmost levity.

I'm the kind of person that responds strongly to a challenge.

The environment is in us, not outside of us. The trees are our lungs, the rivers our bloodstream. We are all interconnected, and what you do to the environment ultimately you do to yourself.

A long-term marriage has to move beyond chemistry to compatibility, to friendship, to companionship. It is certainly not that passion disappears, but that it is conjoined with other ways of love.

I will continue to defend Najaf as it is the holiest place. I will remain in the city until the last drop of my blood has been spilled.

I'm a private intellectual, not a public one.

In my private life I do what I like. The night is my friend. If I don't go out, I don't score.

Yeah, there's some unlikely beasts in the world, and it's best to stay near the ones that you've bought drinks for.

Do not compute the totality of your poultry population until all the manifestations of incubation have been entirely completed.