The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.

When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

Recognize the cunning man not by the corpses he pays homage to but by the living writers he conspires against with the most shameful weapon, Silence, or the briefest review.

It takes a long time to understand nothing.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

It is very perplexing how an intrepid frontier people, who fought a wilderness, floods, tornadoes, and the Rockies, cower before criticism, which is regarded as a malignant tumor in the imagination.

A strong foe is better than a weak friend.

Narcissus never wrote well nor was a friend.

At the end of this day there remains what remained yesterday and what will remain tomorrow: the insatiable, unquantifiable longing to be both the same and other.

Do you think that too, " she said, "that I have slept too long in the moonlight?

The richness of Africa, culturally, is vast. That's the challenge that we have to face, because most of the time, people in the western world, their attention span is really narrow.

Being an actress is a very physical thing. If I didn't look the way I looked, I would never have started in films.

My own electorate, which I represented for 36 years as an anti-apartheid politician, had a considerable number of Jewish voters supporting me throughout my career.

He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.

Accounting for the most part, remains a legalistic and traditional practice, almost immune to self-criticism by scientific methods.

I don't have a microwave oven, but I do have a clock that occasionally cooks stuff.

I'm part German and part Irish. In fact, there's even a town in Germany that was named after my family, Limbach or so forth. And I don't know. I might even have some Indian blood in there.

What you hear, you forget; what you see, you remember; what you do, you understand.