I think the idea of crazy goalkeepers is an old thing, really.

I pretty much knew that I was going to come in fourth, but then I said, 'I'm fourth at the Olympic Games. What are you talking about? Why is that disappointing?'

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.

The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature

He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals.

One cannot always keep an adder in one's breast to feed one, nor rise up every night to sow thorns in the garden of one's soul.

To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote 'King Lear.

To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him.

At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.

He has a simple and a beautiful nature...Don't spoil him. Don't try to influence him. Your influence would be bad. The world is wide, and has many marvellous people in it. Don't take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm it possesses: my life as an artist depends on him.