On the way back from Mumbai to go meet with President Xi in China, I stopped in Singapore to meet with a guy named Lee Kuan Yew, who most foreign policy experts around the world say is the wisest man in the Orient.

First, make yourself a reputation for being a creative genius. Second, surround yourself with partners who are better than you are. Third, leave them to go get on with it.

All I had was to improve on their strategy [...] anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you're both engaged in the same business—you know they're doing something that you aren't.

It was my tutor who dissuaded me from patronizing Green or Blue at the races, or Light or Heavy in the ring;

But I must at the very beginning lay down this principle—friendship can only exist between good men.

I worked with Diodotus the Stoic, who made his residence in my house, and after a life of long intimacy died there only a short time ago.

But of all the bonds of fellowship, there is none more noble, none more powerful than when good men of congenial character are joined in intimate friendship.

Whether it is a natural instinct or a mere illusion, I can't say; but one's emotions are more strongly aroused by seeing the places that tradition records to have been the favourite resort of men of note in former days, than by hearing about their deeds or reading their writings. My own feelings at the present moment are a case in point. I am reminded of Plato, the first philosopher, so we are told, that made a practice of holding discussions in this place;

Who you spend time with is who you become.

You become like the people you spend the most time with.

But it's the same with all my friends, just fun and joking, nothing more. I can never bring myself to talk of anything outside the common round.

It may strike you as a small miracle that you have someone in your life, whose taste you admire, who will tell you the truth and help you stay on the straight and narrow, or find your way back to it if you are lost.