“It is a comfortable feeling to know that you stand on your own ground. Land is about the only thing that can’t fly away.”

No young novelist should ever dare to imitate the style of Dickens.

Whom does anybody trust so implicitly as he trusts his own attorney? And yet is it not the case that the body of attorneys is supposed to be the most roguish body in existence?

What man thinks of changing himself so as to suit his wife?

But the school in which good training is most practiced will, as a rule, turn out the best scholars.

I abominate a humble man, but yet I love to perceive that a man acknowledges the superiority of my sex, and youth and all that kind of thing. . .

And though it is much to be a nobleman, it is more to be a gentleman.

The greatest mistake any man ever made is to suppose that the good things of the world are not worth the winning.

Such young men are often awkward, ungainly, and not yet formed in their gait; they straggle with their limbs, and are shy; words do not come to them with ease, when words are required, among any but their accustomed associates.

A small dainty task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

It’s dogged as does it. It ain’t thinking about it.

The habit of reading is the only one I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade.

But then the pastors and men of God can only be human,–cannot altogether be men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned us, and tortured us, and hence come to love palaces, and fine linen, and purple, and, alas, sometimes, mere luxury and idleness.

A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.

Above all else, never think you’re not good enough.

The true picture of life as it is, if it could be adequately painted, would show men what they are, and how they might rise, not, indeed to perfection, but one step first, and then another on the ladder.

Make all men equal to-day, and God has so created them that they shall be all unequal to-morrow.

You can never know what is and what is not powerful, but you can always find out what the powerful people are scared of.

The leadership knows that you cannot solve the issues of China’s future with the means of the past. The demographic consequences of the one-child policy, the build-up of the welfare state.

Necessity knows no Sunday.

The United States only knows one form of intervention and that is the military one. Everything depends on drawn weapons. We should, however, develop a wider scope of action. And we should learn to be patient.

This complexity is what creates that which we all know – the World – is connected in a system of networks – and I’m not referring only to the internet but also to thousands of analog networks in which we are all immersed at every instant.

If we know who and what we are very thoroughly, we will express and manifest that in what we do. It is all very simple.

They know deep down that certain things in their lives are working or aren’t working, that certain parts of their lives are functional and others are dysfunctional. But sometimes, as human beings, we don’t want to know what’s not convenient. So we pretend not to know.

You come to see that everything you think you know about yourself, everything you think you know about the world, is based on assumptions, beliefs, and opinions-things that you believe because you were taught or told they were true.