“There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you.”

Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.

There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion.

Anything is better than stagnation.

Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.

Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing. It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.

There are always some lunatics about. It would be a dull world without them.

One must wait till it comes.

It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but that you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it.

Healthy scepticism is the basis of all accurate observation.

The future was with Fate. The present was our own.

Skill is fine, and genius is splendid, but the right contacts are more valuable than either.

I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.

It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons.

The individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.

What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is what can you make people believe you have done.

Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.

When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.

Everything you are against weakens you. Everything you are for empowers you.

It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love, never no helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object of its love.

It is a predisposition of human nature to consider an unpleasant idea untrue, and then it is easy to find arguments against it.

American political opportunities are loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.

Humanity is in the highest degree irrational, so that there is no prospect of influencing it by reasonable arguments. Against prejudice one can do nothing.

I’m totally not against plastic surgery. I’ve tried Botox before. That’s the only thing that I’ve done.