People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that, while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human heart. Certain demolitions take place, and it is well that they do, but on condition that they are followed by reconstructions.

It may indeed be said that the word is never a more splendid mystery than when it travels in a man's mind from thought to conscience and back again to thought.

Make thought a whirlwind.

Man is not a circle with a single centre; he is an ellipse with a double focus. Facts form one of these, and ideas the other.

The mind is a garden

He had but one word for both these kinds of toil; he called them gardening. The mind is a garden, said he.

It is a novel constructed like a poem, where each character is only exceptional because if the hyperbolic manner in which he represents generality.

We are what we imagine ourselves to be.

So many people never pause long enough to make up their minds about basic issues of life and death. It's quite possible to go through your whole life, making the mechanical motions of living, adopting as your own sets of ideas you've come to any conclusion for yourself as to what life is all about.

When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.

Altogether, if I'd been looking at nothing but the media all these years, I would be a much more discouraged person-especially given the notion that only conflict is news, and that objectivity means being evenhandedly negative.

Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad.