“Jews are not fit for Heaven, but on earth they are most useful.”

In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past-sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

I don’t want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

Consequences are unpitying.

I flutter all ways, and fly in none.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.

Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name . … Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.

No man can be wise on an empty stomach.

Impatient people, according to Bacon, are like the bees, and kill themselves in stinging others.

Animals are such agreeable friends – they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

Trouble’s made us kin.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

I have nothing to tell except travellers’ stories, which are always tiresome, like the description of a play which was very exciting to those who saw it.

If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.

When I first got into the league, I tried to fit in. Now I don’t care.

Good writing … involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.

The athlete who abuses the rules, receives, we shall have gone a long way toward making commerce a fit pursuit for our young men.

I didn’t fit in anywhere when I grew up, but I was always American, so to survive,

We must not run after it, but we must fit ourselves for the vision and then wait tranquilly for it.

Knowing demands the organ fitted to the object.

But to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.

Whoever dedicates his life to searching out particular connections of nature will spontaneously be confronted with the question how they harmoniously fit into the whole.