“Though silence is not necessarily an admission, it is not a denial, either.”

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.

Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so.

The countenance is the portrait of the soul, and the eyes mark its intention.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

I prefer the most unfair peace to the most righteous war.

The life of the dead is placed on the memories of the living. The love you gave in life keeps people alive beyond their time. Anyone who was given love will always live on in another’s heart.

For the whole life of a philosopher is, as the same philosopher says, a meditation on death.

The shifts of fortune test the reliability of friends.

It is our own evil thoughts which madden us.

Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.

Old age: the crown of life, our play’s last act.

When you are aspiring to the highest place, it is honorable to reach the second or even the third rank.

Politicians are not born; they are excreted.

A mental stain can neither be blotted out by the passage of time nor washed away by any waters.

Our span of life is brief, but is long enough for us to live well and honestly.

In times of war, the law falls silent.

My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.

The modern man is necessarily a seeker of God, maybe a Man of Christ.

Civilization never recedes; the law of necessity ever forces it onwards.

I think the Covid-19 crisis has been blown out of proportion and has created an unnecessary fear psychosis.

Revolutions are spiritual acts. They appear first in people, then in politics and the economy. New people form new structures. The transformation we want is first of all spiritual; that will necessarily change the way things are.

But real life doesn’t travel in a perfect straight line; it doesn’t necessarily have that ‘all lived happily ever after’ bit. You have to work on where you’re going.

Intelligence is an accident of evolution, and not necessarily an advantage.

A merchant, it has been said very properly, is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country.