Society and the World

A man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her imagination, and then they both speak of it as an affair of “the heart.”

Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.

When small men attempt great enterprises, they always end by reducing them to the level of their mediocrity.

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself.

Marriage must constantly fight against a monster which devours everything: routine.

One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.

Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of Nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

When men and women pick one another up for just a bit of fun, they find they’ve picked up more than they bargained for, because men and women have a top story as well as a ground floor, and you can’t have the one without the other.

The allurement that women hold out to men is precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and hence enormously fascinating.

Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is just too much fraternizing with the enemy.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

All of man’s life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ears of others.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought , and attended to my answer.

A family library is a breeding-place for character.

The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.

and observe for himself, and who has hunger for it.

Knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world.

Knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge—broad, deep knowledge— is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low.

Knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty.