First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

When he was a young man he prayed constantly for chastity; but years later he realized that while his lips had been saying 'Oh Lord, make me chaste,' his heart had been secretly adding, 'But please don't do it just yet.

And what about you? You must be some kind of beardless dwarf?...You mean to say, that you're a daughter of Eve?...Y-yes, but, you are in fact... human?

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.

The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.

All shall be done, but it may be harder than you think.

A particular ikon an aid to devotion may be itself a word of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better ... ikon. They may make it a worse one.