“Truth sits upon the lips of dying men.”

Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.

Philistinism! – We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.

For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.

Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

Say, has some wet bird-haunted English lawn Lent it the music of its trees at dawn?

Bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness full of grandeur.

Nor bring, to see me cease to live, Some doctor full of phrase and fame, To shake his sapient head, and give The ill he cannot cure a name.

Force and right are the governors of this world; force till right is ready.

At the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.

Sometimes they are the same exact thing.

I often say to my assistants, “Never trust anybody,” but what I mean is that you should never trust someone else to do a job exactly the way you would want it done.

Not even I, in my original Spanish, am necessarily obliged to make exact quotations. I can do that or not,

This [discovery of a cell-free yeast extract] will make him famous

I actually had less time and the exact same budget on Hairspray, which was few years ago and this is a much bigger movie [then Rock of Ages]. That’s the way studios do it now.

We aren’t exactly emptying the oceans; it’s more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.

There are moments as a teacher when I’m conscious that I’m trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago.

Too exact, and studious of similitude rather than of beauty.