The world is full of people who have lost faith: politicians who have lost faith in politics, social workers who have lost faith in social work, schoolteachers who have lost faith in teaching and, for all I know, policemen who have lost faith in policing and poets who have lost faith in poetry. It's a condition of faith that it gets lost from time to time, or at least mislaid.

It shows considerable wisdom to know what you want in life and then to direct all your energies towards getting it.

Increase your word power. Words are the raw material of our craft.

It's easy to get a reputation for wisdom. It's only necessary to live long, speak little and do less.

If all power corrupts, then a doctor, who literally holds life and death in his hands, must be at particular risk.

Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.