The laughter of adults was always very different from the laughter of children. The former indicated a recognition of the familiar, but in children it came from the shock of the new.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading.

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

Adversity is a great teacher, but this teacher makes us pay dearly for its instruction; and often the profit we derive, is not worth the price we paid.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

The famous carry about with them a great weight of patriarchal baggage-the footnotes of their lives.

The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

Sometimes one has the feeling of an almost supernatural character to the shifts and changes in our national mood. They appear beyond the prose of cause and effect.

Self-love is an idolatry. Self-hatred is a tragedy.

When you travel your first discovery is that you do not exist.

... civilization—a word that simply means "living in cities..."Excerpt From: Standage, Tom. “A History of the World In 6 Glasses.

The advantages of philosophy? That I am able to hold converse with myself.

I never could get on with representative individuals but people who existed on their own account and with whom it might therefore be possible to be friends.

My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth inside out into the light.

The educated man had throughout the ages found a way to covert passionate activity into silent and motionless pleasure. He can sit still in a room and not perish.

I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago.

At that time [1954], as a result of political events, I was deeply preoccupied by my relations with the Communist Party.

Things grew and lived in constant adversity, ingenious in solving problems of existence.

At the moment we've only got 16 first-team players and my initials stand for Mick McCarthy, not Merlin the Magician (the new Wolves manager gets the excuses in early!)

If I told my parents that I was going to do that [ to be really counsel to a Prime Minister] when I was kid, they would probably put me in therapy.