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.

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

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.

Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age.

When you are rich, your past disappears. You get everything you want when you want it . . . Everyone wants to know you. Everyone wants to be your friend.

Why did I come here? I thought. Why is it always only a matter of choosing between something bad and something worse?

There is an art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon’s knife

Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented.

Composing's not voluntary, you know. There's no choice, you're not free. You're landed with an idea and you have responsibility to that idea.

Being the leader means you have to make life or death decisions sometimes.

I was always very comfortable with who I was. Confident. I’ve never looked at [my body] in a negative way.

Of course, I think it is legitimate for the Commander-in-Chief to be concerned for the safety of his soldiers.

I'm a historian, and that freaks me out.

* We can still alter our course. It is NOT too late. We still have options. We need the courage to change our values to the regeneration of our families, the life that surrounds us.