“With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?”

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.

If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.

I have nothing to declare except my genius.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

To define is to limit.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

I think sometimes what people miss about black people is that we’re complicated.

We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.

Oh, you who are trying to learn the marvel of Love through the copy book of reason, I’m very much afraid that you will never really see the point.

An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain.

Elvis Presley is all there is. There just ain’t no more. Everything starts and ends with Elvis. He wrote the book. He is everything to do and not to do in the music business.

This is beautiful indeed; the colored people have given this to the head of the government, and that government once sanctioned laws that would not permit its people to learn enough to enable them to read this book.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

Life is like an endless book. Each day is a new page and only death can bring the end to this little book of yours.