The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, "bread-bread-fame" or "fame-fame-bread."

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

He who understands the wise is wise already.

I want you to ask yourself the entire time before you meet me, 'Is this really what I want?

People are strange . . .

Because sometimes I have a need for human warmth, I answered honestly. Sometimes, if I can't feel something like the warmth of a woman's skin, I get so lonely I can't stand it.

Powerful people can love without being loved back.

A person trying to meditate is doing something that's impossible since meditation is not an action.

If God were alive today, He'd be an atheist.

Am I mad, to see what others do not see, or are they mad who are responsible for all that I am seeing?

Death is at any time blessed but it is twice blessed for a warrior who dies for his cause, that is, truth.

I've finally learned not to want things I cannot have.

When I say my mission is to make polo bigger, I don't expect it to be baseball, but for sure to bring the attention of a lot more people to the sport.