Excrement can never be culturally elaborated to the extent that nutriment can.

Good manners can render even virtue tolerable.

Death is frightening, and so is Eternal Life.

Great men wait for the right moment to abandon caution. The rest of us abandon it when impatience becomes too much for us.

Every book teaches a lesson, even if the lesson is only that one has chosen the wrong book.

Neat trick: to be roused to ambition and reconciled to one's mediocrity at the same time.

Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape.