“If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.”

To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich.

For in that city -New York; there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy.

What is youth except a man or a woman before it is ready or fit to be seen.

I prefer all but the very worst travel books, to all but the very best novels.

It is a curious thing. That every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.

To understand all is to forgive all.

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

The human mind is inspired enough when it comes to inventing horrors; it is when it tries to invent a Heaven that it shows itself cloddish.

It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.

Here I am,’ I thought, ‘back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.

You don’t remove the evil in a person by killing the person.

Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.

I work hard. But I play hard, too.

What I tell everyone, and I really do for myself is, I have a long-run dream, which is I want to work on stuff that I think matters.

We are well aware of the task ahead of us in what will be a very difficult match but which we all dream of playing.

I am busy just now again on Electro-Magnetism and think I have got hold of a good thing but can’t say; it may be a weed instead of a fish that after all my labour I may at last pull up.

What makes the difference between a great player and just a normal player is dedication, work, commitment.

Bring your whole self to work. I don’t believe we have a professional self Monday through Friday and a real self the rest of the time. It is all professional and it is all personal.

I was elected to come to an incredibly dysfunctional capital and make the government work better, and that’s what I’m doing.

Luck has nothing to do with it, because I have spent many, many hours, countless hours, on the court working for my one moment in time, not knowing when it would come.