"Talk is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money, it is all profit, it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health."

"You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage."

"It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect."

"There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change."

"To dream is to realize that character is forged in the fires of discipline."

"In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint."

"Man is not imprisoned by habit. Great changes in him can be wrought by crisis - once that crisis can be recognized and understood."

"A humble soul understands that character is forged in the fires of discipline."