“I hate being all tidy like a book in a library where nobody reads – prison is horribly like that.”

Your writing is never as good as you hoped, but never as bad as you feared.

Not to be absolutely certain is, I think, one of the essential things in rationality.

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Those who have never known the deep intimacy and the intense companionship of happy mutual love have missed the best thing that life has to give.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

The use of self-control is like the use of brakes on the train. It is useful when you find yourself in the wrong direction but merely harmful when the direction is right.

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won’t go.

I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

One of the most powerful of all our passions is the desire to be admired and respected.

Mathematics rightly viewed possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.

Patriots always talk of dying for their country but never of killing for their country.

The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is night, about nothing at all.

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.

Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.

The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

Nature and Books belong to the eyes that see them.

A written word is the choicest of relics.

Too many of us are taking our dreams to our graves. Songs that were never sung. Poems never written. Businesses never started. Relationships never formed. Books never written. Dreams never lived.