“True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.”

Newspapers are being read all around. The point is not, of course, to glean new information, but rather to coax the mind out of its sleep-induced introspective temper.

The mind does most of its best thinking when we aren’t there. The answers are there in the morning.

We will cease to be angry once we cease to be so hopeful.

At the heart of every frustration lies a basic structure: the collision of a wish with an unyielding reality.

Though it may feel otherwise, enjoying life is no more dangerous than apprehending it with continuous anxiety and gloom.

So many complaints boil down to the belly ache of the fragile, mortal, ignored ego in a vast and indifferent universe.

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.

If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.

The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority.

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

The majority of the time, you go out to eat with your teammates, then rest for the next day’s game. It’s not a vacation – most guys view the road as a business trip.

Since these early days, I have seen and have experienced many types of discrimination and all of them were rooted in the fear of people that were different than the majority.

It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play.

The government have only a small majority in the House of Commons. I want to make it quite clear that this will not affect our ability to govern. Having been charged with the duties of Government we intend to carry out those duties.

The majority of pop stars are complete idiots in every respect.