“For my own part I have always felt that a politician is to be judged by the animosities which he excites among his opponents. I have always set myself not merely to relish but to deserve thoroughly their censure.”

“If anger is not restrained, it is frequently more hurtful to us than the injury that provokes it.”

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

“Weariness, which seeks to get to the ultimate with one leap, with one death-leap; a poor ignorant weariness, unwilling even to will any longer: that created all gods and afterworlds.”

“ "Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire."”

“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”

“And this, Cebes, is the reason why the true lovers of knowledge are temperate and brave; and not for the reason that the world gives. For not in that way does the soul of a philosopher reason. ...Never fear, Simmias and Cebes, that a soul which has been thus nurtured and has had these pursuits, will at her departure from the body be scattered and blown away by the winds and be nowhere and nothing.”

“Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around.”

“I wonder whether any other generation has seen such astounding revolutions of data and values as those through which we have lived. Scarcely anything material or established which I was brought up to believe was permanent and vital, has lasted. Everything I was sure or taught to be sure was impossible, has happened.”

“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.”

“ “He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.””

“In general, one must have value oneself in order freely and willingly to acknowledge value in another. This is the basis for the requirement that modesty accompany all merits, as well as the disproportionately loud praise for this virtue which alone, among all its sisters, is always added to the praise of anyone distinguished in some way by the person who dares to praise him, so as to conciliate the worthless and silence their wrath. For what is modesty if not false humility which someone with merits and advantages in a world teeming with perfidious envy uses to beg the pardon of those who have none? Someone who does not lay claim to merit because he in fact has none is being honest, not modest.”

“There is no easy way from the earth to the stars.”

“The union of opposites, in so far as they are really complementary, always results in the most perfect harmony; and the seemingly incongruous is often the most natural.”

“Death, like generation, is a secret of Nature.”

“The perfect normal person is rare in our civilization.”

“When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.”

“Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then — the glory — so that a cricket song sweetens the ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished.”

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”

“When you fall in love with the process rather than the product, you don’t have to wait to give yourself permission to be happy. You can be satisfied anytime your system is running.”

“If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.”

“Is the only lesson of history to be that mankind is unteachable?”

“No hour of life is lost that is spent in the saddle.”

“Our life dreams the Utopia. Our death achieves the Ideal.”

“To live alone one must be an animal or a God - says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both - a philosopher.”

““People can’t live with change if there’s not a changeless core inside them.””

“Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.”

““Well, he used to say that the great thing in married life was patience. Do you hear, Vanya? Not love, but patience. Love cannot last long. You have lived two years in love, and now evidently your married life has reached the period when, in order to preserve equilibrium, so to speak, you ought to exercise all your patience. . . .””

“There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.”