“The Vice-Presidency is sort of like the last cookie on the plate. Everybody insists he won’t take it, but somebody always does.”

The eyes are the amulets of the mind.

A third, of more extensive learning, ran To Sir George Villiers’ Ghost, and Mrs. Veal; Of sheeted Spectres spoke with shorten’d breath, And thrice he quoted Drelincourt on Death.

I count this thing to be grandly true: That a noble deed is a step toward God.

The Universe knows itself and expands itself through me.

O hour, of all hours, the most blesse’d upon earth, The bless’d hour of our dinners!

It’s never safe to be nostalgic about something until you’re absolutely certain there’s no chance of its coming back

Most people – and particularly people whose lives have nothing to do with books at all – are intrigued by the idea that somebody wants to listen to them and get it right.

Even pearls are dark before the whiteness of his teeth.

A mission could be defined as an image of a desired state that you want to get to. Once fully seen, it will inspire you to act, fuel your imagination and determine your behavior.

Humility is the embroidery of chiefs.

He (God) doesn’t need me, but He desires me.

There is no need to engage in a mental dialogue about the merits and demerits of the fish, emotionally react to the fish, or jump into the water to try to catch the fish. Once the fish is out of sight, it should also be out of mind.

Discipline is like cabbage. We may not care for it ourselves, but feel sure it would be good for somebody else.

Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.

I want to be the first to bless you on what God has blessed you with – fighting in the heart of the Muslim world that was a battleground for large historic Islamic wars and what is now the place of Islam’s greatest war in the present era.

How many of us have been first attracted to reason, first learned to think, to draw conclusions, to extract a moral from the follies of life, by some dazzling aphorism from Rochefoucauld or La Bruyere.

Having the equivalent of 150,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs at the ready does nothing to protect us from terrorists planning to sneak in a bomb through a cargo container.

The camera does not like acting. The camera is only interested in filming behaviour. So you damn well learn your lines until you know them inside out, while standing on your head!

There are two things: 1) what things one does in the world, and 2) what family one has. There’s the two really tangible things that can stay.

Maybe Oliver Stone doesn’t lend himself well to remakes or sequels, because he does them so well the first time.

It does seem to me that at least some of us have made an idol of exhaustion. The only time we know we have done enough is when we are running on empty and when the ones we love most are the ones we see the least.

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.

Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them.

Do not turn yourself from an end into a means-one does not justify the other.