An unexamined idea, to paraphrase Socrates, is not worth having and a society whose ideas are never explored for possible error may eventually find its foundations insecure.

Our best chance for happiness is education.

To be what no one ever was, to be what everyone has been: Freedom is the mean of those extremes that fence all effort in.

When it aims to express a love of the world it refuses to conceal the many reasons why the world is hard to love, though we must love it because we have no other, and to fail to love it is not to exist at all.

Wit is the only wall between us and the dark.

The literature of the world has exerted its power by being translated.

It’s a curious thing. I suppose most people think of artists as impatient but I don’t know of any first-rate artist who hasn’t manifested in his career an appalling patience, a willingness to wait and to do his best now in the expectation that next year he will do better.