“Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.”

None but a fool worries about things he cannot influence.

A man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks Greek.

When there is no hope, there can be no endeavor.

No man was ever great by imitation.

To preserve health is a moral and religious duty: for health is the basis of all social virtues; and we can be useful no longer than while we are well.

From thee, great God, we spring, to thee we tend,- Path, motive, guide, original, and end.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing – it only hastens fools to rush in where angels fear to tread.

Our aspirations are our possibilities.

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

Prejudice, not being founded on reason, cannot be removed by argument.

If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle.

The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.

If a madman were to come into this room with a stick in his hand, no doubt we should pity the state of his mind; but our primary consideration would be to take care of ourselves. We should knock him down first, and pity him afterwards.

A horse that can count to ten is a remarkable horse, not a remarkable mathematician.

When I open many books, or most leading women’s magazines, or see almost all TV shows, I don’t find myself at all. I am completely anonymous. My value system is not there.

I was given some Harry Potter books by a young friend. I wanted to know why young people liked it so much. And I noted that there were some values in Harry Potter that are common to many books that are popular all over the world. In the end,

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

My problem is that people have been writing books about me.A lot of things that people write about you are incorrect, but you don’t fight about it.

I have somewhere seen it observed that we should make the same use of a book that the bee does of a flower: she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it.

Together, we can make ourselves a nation that spends more on books than on bombs, more on hospitals than the terrible tools of war, more on decent houses than military aircraft.

I don’t normally have time to read, so when I go away I like to take a few books.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap – people shouldn’t read that stuff.