wisdom Quotes

As for 'Great Expectations', it is up there for me with the world's greatest novels, not least as it vindicates plot as no other novel I can think of does, since what there is to find out is not coincidence or happenstance but the profoundest moral truth.

Sometimes it's best to speak from ignorance: that way, you can see the wood without being distracted by the trees.

You can imprison but you can't enslave a man who argues with his books.

When emotion rules, every fool thinks that he is holy.

Nobody who's thought about politics or democracy over the thousands of years that people have been thinking about democracy hasn't come up against the fact that the people will often be wrong. And what do you do when they are? You can't just say, 'Well, it's the will of the people.'

If you're on a freeway and want to know if you're being followed, what you do is enormously vary your speed. You accelerate to 100 and slow down to 30 and then accelerate again. In a city, you make a lot of turns against the stream of traffic. You go around a roundabout twice.

Writers have an opinion about the world and offer arguments about the world. They should offer contemplation.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

I've met the Dalai Lama briefly, but I would probably say my grandfather was the wisest person I ever met. He was my mother's father, an Indian, a family doctor, and very unlike me in that he was deeply religious.

England in a way is lucky. It's an island, so the frontiers are given by the sea.