A little rest and meditation often saves a lot of riding over rough country.
The deep sea can be fathomed, but who knows the heart of a woman?
A man can lose sight of everything else when he’s bent on revenge, and it ain’t worth it.
I have read my books by many lights, hoarding their beauty, their wit or wisdom against the dark days when I would have no book, nor a place to read. I have known hunger of the belly kind many times over, but I have known a worse hunger: the need to know and to learn.
Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.
Books are the building blocks of civilization, for without the written word, a man knows nothing beyond what occurs during his own brief years and, perhaps, in a few tales his parents tell him.
Only one who has learned much can fully appreciate his ignorance.
The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.
To a fool time brings only age not wisdom.
Victory is not won in miles but in inches.
A mind, like a home, is furnished by its owner, so if one’s life is cold and bare he can blame none but himself. You have a chance to select from pretty elegant furnishings.
What is education but a conditioning of the mind to a society and a way of life.
No one can get an education, for of necessity education is a continuing process.
No memory is ever alone; it’s at the end of a trail of memories, a dozen trails that each have their own associations.
Men strive for peace, but it is their enemies that give them strength, and I think if man no longer had enemies, he would have to invent them, for his strength only grows from struggle.
No man ever raised a monument to a cynic or wrote a poem about a man without faith.
Our libraries are not cloisters for an elite. They are for the people, and if they are not used, the fault belongs to those who do not take advantage of their wealth.
Love is a moment of stillness that sometimes a word can shatter to pieces. Or love can be a thing that endures, a rich, deep current flowing unending through the years.
To pursue a man effectively, it is best to begin with his thinking.
A writer’s brain is like a magician’s hat. If you’re going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first.