“The simplest explanation is always the most likely.”

There is no greater mistake in life than seeing things or hearing them at the wrong time.

You don’t realize what fine fighting material there is in age. You show me any one who’s lived to over seventy and you show me a fighter – someone who’s got the will to live.

Assumptions are dangerous things.

But surely for everything you love you have to pay some price.

To every problem, there is a most simple solution.

Until one looks back on one’s own past one fails to realise what an extraordinary view of the world a child has.

Fiction is founded on truth unless things did happen, people couldn’t think of them.

There are questions that you don’t ask because you’re afraid of the answers to them.

I learned that one can never go back, that one should not ever try to go back – that the essence of life is going forward. Life is really a one way street, isn’t it?

Everyone is a potential murderer-in everyone there arises from time to time thewish to kill-though not the will to kill.

One must accept the fact that we have only one companion in this world, a companion who accompanies us from the cradle to the grave – our own self. Get on good terms with that companion – learn to live with yourself.

Very few of us are what we seem.

Writing is a great comfort to people like me, who are unsure of themselves and have trouble expressing themselves properly.

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming… suddenly you find – at the age of 50, say – that a whole new life has opened before you.

There is nothing more thrilling in this world, I think, than having a child that is yours, and yet is mysteriously a stranger.

Books are a habit-forming drug.

I was a good student and stuff like that.

Empower yourselves with a good education, then get out there and use that education to build a country worthy of your boundless promise.

Harvard takes perfectly good plums as students, and turns them into prunes.

If children are to be educated to understand the true principle of patriotism, their mother must be a patriot.

In object lessons in elementary education and in laboratory instruction in higher education, the subject is often so treated that the student fails to see the forest on account of the trees.

The goal of education is to enable individuals to continue their education.

Education in its early stages always begins with fault-finding, but when it is complete, it sees the positive element in everything.

Uneducated people delight in argument and fault-finding, for it is easy to find fault, but difficult to recognize the good and its inner necessity.