Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it.

True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it is lost.

Nothing more completely baffles one who is full of trick and duplicity himself, than straight forward and simple integrity in another.

The soundest argument will produce no more conviction in an empty head than the most superficial declamation; as a feather and a guinea fall with equal velocity in a vacuum.

The art of declamation has been sinking in value from the moment that speakers were foolish enough to publish, and hearers wise enough to read.

None are so fond of secrets as those who do not mean to keep them; such persons covet secrets as a spendthrift covets money, for the purpose of circulation.

Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away.

Let those who would affect singularity with success first determine to be very virtuous, and they will be sure to be very singular.

Atheism is a system which can communicate neither warmth nor illumination, except from those fagots which your mistaken zeal has lighted up for its destruction.

Deliberate with caution, but act with decision and yield with graciousness, or oppose with firmness.

The study of mathematics, like the Nile, begins in minuteness but ends in magnificence.

Outer beauty you see with your eyes, but inner beauty you only see with your heart.

All the world talks, knowledge or information, takes you nowhere unless it’s applied into life. It’s only the experience, which allows you to see, beyond the present state.

Unfortunately, it's possible to be able to do something extremely well that nobody ever wants done.

The epic disappeared along with the age of personal heroism; there can be no epic with artillery.

Children require long, uniterrupted periods of play and exploration

If I were white, I'd get less criticism.

Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?

It amazes me to witness the masochism with which some journalists characterize their industry as a dying species. The future belongs to citizen journalism and blogs.

Essentially my contribution was to introduce repetition into Western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything just repeated patterns, musical patterns.

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.