There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.

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.

You don't know how you got there or how it's going to end, but how you deal when you´re in it is what makes you a man

The learning curve is 'The Hobbit' is being shot in 3D.

It is innocence that is full and experience that is empty. It is innocence that wins and experience that loses.

Anybody that forms a group, writes songs and releases records and says they don't care if people like them are complete liars.

Part of the reason some Japanese companies have underperformed financially was corporate governance and board structures.

I don't smoke pot or cigarettes, so inhaling smoke as a non-smoker - it doesn't matter what it is, it's going to make you lightheaded.

Reports of illegal migrants carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis are particularly concerning.

True love isn't reserved for weddings and ceremonies. It's from the heart. That's all it has to be. All it ever is.

I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican.

I'm not going to hold my breath because life goes on. Life is too short to sit around moaning about what could have been or what was.