There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly.

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.

Circumstances are the rulers of the weak they are but the instruments of the wise.

The number one way culture is shaped is by what leaders model.

...loving a fairy lady with a magic song will leave you desolate on a cold hillside ... but from there you can see the stars...

I have always felt a little held back by working with other people in recording.

I'm trying to do what Frank O'Hara did and remind myself there there's a lot of good stuff. I write about New York for my own mental health.

Apelles used to paint a good housewife on a snail, to import that she home-keeping.

the virtue of imagination has this in common with the virtue of courage. Without it, you are less good: with it, you are not necessarily better.

I play football, and most football players are camera shy. We just want to be left alone; we just want to stick to what we do.

With whose imperfections will you bear, and what insult are you capable of enduring, if a thoughtless word from your own Superior is unbearable?

I'm very inspired by him-it was my father who taught us that an immigrant must work twice as hard as anybody else, that he must never give up.