The combative instinct is a savage prompting by which one man's good is found in another's evil.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.

Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends: have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.

The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age.

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

Experience seems to most of us to lead to conclusions, but empiricism has sworn never to draw them.

Man is a gregarious animal, and much more so in his mind than in his body. He may like to go alone for a walk, but he hates to stand alone in his opinions.

The Difficult is that which can be done immediately; the Impossible that which takes a little longer.

I don't want my kids to be like me. I want them to be better than me.

The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place.

An invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor.

If x is the population of the United States and y is the degree of imbecility of the average American, then democracy is the theory that x times y is less than y

How much more precious is a little humanity than all the rules in the world.

So OK, it's your special big Four-O birthday But don't expect me to be obsequious and fawning You, being you, can't possibly be a good example So do try, at least, to serve as a warning

Look, I might have lived in England for the last several years but I'm still an American citizen and I have not given up my right to privacy.

We have come a long way and we have a little further to go.

The warm sun kissed the earthTo consecrate thy birth,And from his close embraceThy radiant faceSprang into sight,A blossoming delight.

In any man who dies there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight... Not people die but worlds die in them.