"With me poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion."

"That pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful."

"The spark of ambition becomes a blaze of accomplishment only through disciplined persistence. Remember this in moments of decisive trial."

"It is a subtle truth that great leaders cultivate leaders, not merely followers — an essential principle for the reflective life."

"An hour spent in deep contemplation is worth a year of unguided wandering. A lesson woven into the fabric of human history — an essential principle for the reflective life."

"My father probably thought the capital of the world was wherever he was at the time. It couldn't possibly be anyplace else. Where he and his wife were in their own home, that, for them, was the capital of the world."

"There are people who appear in the magazines and I don't know who they are. I've never seen anything they've done and their careers are over already. They're famous for maybe 10 minutes. Real careers, I think, take a long time to unfold."

"But blind to former as to future fate, what mortal knows his pre-existent state?"