... it is a great mistake to confuse conventionality with simplicity ... it takes a good deal of intelligence and a great many inhibitions to follow a social code.

The real drawback to the simple life is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time.

Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life.

Educational legislation nowadays is largely in the hands of illiterate people, and the illiterate will take good care that their illiteracy is not made a reproach on them.

There is no morality by instinct. There is no social salvation in the end without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience.

Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity, both of these have done destructive work in the colleges.

Nothing makes people so worthy of compliments as receiving them. One is more delightful for being told one is delightful-just as one is more angry for being told one is angry.

Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.

No fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is the thin millionaires.

All violations of essential privacy are brutalizing.

You can bear anything if it is not your fault.

Success is likened to a deep pit, you have to jump in to get it, then you'll need a ladder of grace to climb out to enjoy it.

Thinking about something is the surest way to miss out on the beauty of that actual something.

Sometimes the guilty one is not the person who has committed the crime, but the person who has created the possibility for it to be committed.

From the shaken tower A flock of bells take flight, And go with the hour.

Tantra and adventure are very, very connected. Perhaps the greatest enemy for one who's journeying along the spiritual path is complacency.

That grand old poem called Winter

I am delighted to have had students, friends and colleagues in so many nations and to have learned so much of what I know from them. This Nobel Award honours them all.

Book reviews have never helped me. Most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time.

I look a lot busier than I am, as I'm actually a rather sporadic, random person and I'll play a few gigs and then disappear for a while.

In time, the church will actually be organized more as a military force with an army, navy, air force, etc.