Wisdom

Other people's weakness can destroy you just as much as their strength can. Weak people are not harmless. Their weakness can be their strength.

What's optimism? Said Cacambo. Alas, said Candide, it is a mania for saying things are well when one is in hell.

I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win. Because the ideas are invisible, and they linger, and, sometimes, they can even be true. Eppur si muove: and yet it moves.

The woman, who is not the wife, has no right to receive the seed of the man, because it is the man and not the woman, who has to bear the responsibility for his seed.

Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.

Simplicity is one complication that I can live without.

But the tale or narrative set in the past may have its particular time-free value; and the candid reader will not misunderstand me, will not suppose that I intend any preposterous comparison, when I observe that Homer was farther removed in time from Troy than I am from the Napoleonic wars; yet he spoke to the Greeks for 2,000 years and more.

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor.

Keep in mind that in the whole long tradition of storytelling, from Greek myths through Shakespeare through King Arthur and Robin Hood, this whole notion that you can't tell stories about certain characters because someone else owns them is a very modern one - and to my mind, a very strange one.

But I cant' translate it the right way, that's why I always use so many foreign languages around you, because there're some things that simply can't translate, that are beautiful when you read them the original way.

The search for knowledge is a long and difficult task.

Always be straight with flexibility and positive; it is medicine for two, first for your in health and second your wounded enemy.

Twas doing nothing was his curse. Is there a vice can plague us worse?

We have to be honest to ourselves to see honesty in others.

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.

This means, in a way, that true light is dependent on the presence of other lights. Take the others away and darkness results. Yet the reverse is not true: take away darkness and there is only more darkness. Darkness can exist by itself. Light cannot.

In a world where vows are worthless.Where making a pledge means nothing. Where promises are made to be broken, it would be nice to see words come back into power.

I utilise all my spare moments. I've read twenty-seven of the Hundred Best Books. I collect ferns.

What is a highbrow? He is a man who has found something more interesting than women.

The mind speaks, thought it does not have lips. The heart moves, though it does not have feet. The soul rises, though it does not have wings.