This at least should be a rule through the letter-writing world: that no angry letter be posted till four-and-twenty hours will have elapsed since it was written.

An author must be nothing if he do not love truth; a barrister must be nothing if he do.

When the ivy has found its tower, when the delicate creeper has found its strong wall, we know how the parasite plants grow and prosper.

Never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. People will take you very much at your own reckoning.

Fame is a skittish jade, more fickle even than Fortune, and apt to shy, and bolt, and plunge away on very trifling causes.

What on earth could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book, and a cup of coffee?...Was ever anything so civil?

The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

It has now become the doctrine of a large clan of politicians that political honesty is unnecessary, slow, subversive of a man's interests, and incompatible with quick onward movement.

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.

Life sure is easier when you're rich.""And a natural born charmer. Don't forget that part.""How could I?" she retorted. "It's the only thing we have in common.

An honest God is the noblest work of man.

An ear for music is very different from a taste for music. I have no ear whatever I could not sing an air to save my life but I have the intensest delight in music and can detect good from bad.

You really have to love what you are doing, so you don't give up.

The universe is Why, How, and What, in any order, and all at once.

That looks like something out of the dumpster of planned parenthood.

Boulez, who is everything I don't want art to be... Boulez, who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only how it is made.

I’ve learned not to worry about what might come next.

There are some remedies worse than disease.

That which endures is not one or another association of living forms, but the process of which the cosmos is the product, and of which these are among the transitory expressions.