It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

My mother was a full-time mother. She didn’t have much of her own career, her own life, her own experiences… everything was for her children. I will never be as good a mother as she was. She was just grace incarnate. She was the most generous, loving – she’s better than me.

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.

Proper sleep has helped me get to where I am today as an athlete, and it is something that I continue to rely on every day.

Shakespeare – I was very influenced – still am – by Shakespeare. I couldn’t believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you’d been the only man in the world.

If life gives you limes, make margaritas.

The earth laughs in flowers.

The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

I cannot live without books.

Charity bestowed upon those who are worthy of it is like good seed sown on a good soil that yields an abundance of fruits. But alms given to those who are yet under the tyrannical yoke of the passions are like seed deposited in a bad soil. The passions of the receiver of the alms choke, as it were, the growth of merits.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.

The valiant never taste of death but once.

I believe many people feel like God is mad at them.

No one has ever become poor by giving.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.

Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.

It’s true my father abused me and didn’t love and protect me the way he should have, and at times it seemed no one would ever help me and it would never end. But God always had a plan for my life, and He has redeemed me.

Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one.

I tell everybody, I get so much because I give so much. I give freely, I give all my time, give all my money, give all of my soul. I try to motivate people. I try to inspire them.

All my stories are like the Greek and Roman myths, and the Egyptian myths, and the Old and New Testament.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

The high destiny of the individual is to serve rather than to rule.

I have somewhere met with the epitaph on a charitable man which has pleased me very much. I cannot recollect the words, but here is the sense of it: ‚What I spent I lost; what I possessed is left to others; what I gave away remains with me.‘

What we won when all of our people united must not be lost in suspicion and distrust and selfishness and politics. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else’s head instead of with one’s own.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water. There are too many inconsistencies.

If you can’t beat them, arrange to have them beaten.

If Christ has died for me, ungodly as I am, without strength as I am, then I cannot live in sin any longer, but must arouse myself to love and serve Him who has redeemed me.

Anyone who wants to be pope doesn’t care much for themselves, God doesn’t bless them. I didn’t want to be pope.

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.

I am very strict about what I eat. I do not consume anything that my body does not require. It takes a lot of sacrifice and discipline. It wasn’t easy before but now its second nature for me.

I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries.

I love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.

I’ve loved reading all my life.

Work is the curse of the drinking classes.

If we ever forget that we are One Nation Under God, then we will be a nation gone under.

In Germany I have been acknowledged again since the fall of Hitler, but my works, partly suppressed by the Nazis and partly destroyed by the war; have not yet been republished there.

Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me.

I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‚Nobody under 40,‘ or ‚Nobody under 25.‘ With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‚reader.‘

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

If there is one thing I fear less than everything else, it is, I believe, persecution for my opinions. There are a good many points about which I may be diffident, but when it comes to questions of Truth and intellectual independence, there is no holding me – I can envisage no finer end than to sacrifice oneself for a conviction.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.