“Misery is almost always the result of thinking.”

It is better to debate a question without settling it than to settle a question without debating it.

Who ever has no fixed opinions has no constant feelings.

Children need models rather than critics.

How many people make themselves abstract to appear profound. The most useful part of abstract terms are the shadows they create to hide a vacuum.

Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.

Space is the stature of God.

Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love the truth.

The mind conceives with pain, but it brings forth with delight.

All are born to observe order, but few are born to establish it.

You will not find poetry anywhere unless you bring some of it with you.

The aim of argument, or of discussion, should not be victory, but progress.

Love and fear. Everything the father of a family says must inspire one or the other.

To teach is to learn twice.

Pleasures are always children, pains always have wrinkles.

The passions of the young are vices in the old.

Kindness is loving people more than they deserve.

To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgment.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

When i’m wasted, i can almost forget who i am,” he said, his smile fading slightly. “i know i’m still there, but only barely. It’s a good place to be.” he tipped back the thermos, eyes on the dark sea straight ahead

I had that. I could almost feel the miles between us shrinking, as if we were at two ends of some invisible elastic thread.

Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.

Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.

Jesus warns people far more often about greed than about sex, yet almost no one thinks they are guilty of it.