“The world is the same everywhere.”

Gratitude is a soil on which joy thrives.

If you sound great in the practice room, you’re practicing the wrong thing. Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

All men are selfish, but the vain man is in love with himself. He admires, like the lover his adored one, everything which to others is indifferent.

Of all afflictions, the worst is self contempt.

No mortal eye has ever fully seen a flash of lightning … for no matter how firmly we look, our eyes are sure to be dazzled.

Some men, like modern shops, hang everything in their show windows; when one goes inside, nothing is to be found.

Judaism lives not in an abstract creed, but in its institutions.

Truly, one gets easier accustomed to a silken bed than to a sack of leaves.

Weak men are easily put out of humor. Oil freezes quicker than water.

To acquire money requires valor, to keep money requires prudence, and to spend money well is an art.

It is only when one is thoroughly true that there can be purity and freedom. Falsehood always punishes itself.

To harbor hatred and animosity in the soul makes one irritable, gloomy, and prematurely old.

Only he is free who cultivates his own thoughts and strives without fear to do justice to them.

Our second mother, habit, is also a good mother.

People look with sympathetic eyes only at the blossom and the fruit, and disregard the long period of transition during which the one is ripening into the other.

Why has no religion this command before all others: Thou shalt work?

A lot of people say that Eleanor Roosevelt wasn’t a good mother. And there are two pieces to that story. One is, when they were very young, she was not a good mother. She was an unhappy mother.

I have a very happy, healthy relationship with the country, so it’s really easy to go everywhere because I always have Iceland to go back to. It’s sort of a contradiction, but that’s how it works somehow.

I’ve been a slave to football. It follows you home, it follows you everywhere, and eats into your family life. But every working man misses out on some things because of his job.

Commuting in a wheelchair is not easy. I live in a very old part of Rome. These cobbles everywhere… terrible! In London, it is the same. Every pavement is uneven.

Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere

There will always be leaks; in Washington, everywhere.

I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me.

I forced a smile. It was the one i’d been practicing all morning. It felt tight at the edges and brittle everywhere in between.