The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.

The wisdom of the wise, and the experience of ages, may be preserved by quotation.

After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style.

All is extremely genteel; and there is almost as much repose as in the golden saloons of the contiguous palaces. At any rate, if there be as much vice, there is as little crime.

Certain it is that their power increased always in an exact proportion to the weakness of the Caliphate, and, without doubt, in some of the most distracted periods of the Arabian rule, the Hebrew Princes rose into some degree of local and temporary importance.

Enthusiasm is that secret and harmonious spirit which hovers over the production of genius.

Fortune has rarely condescended to be the companion of genius.

Happy the man when he has not the defects of his qualities.

It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us.

Literature is an avenue to glory, ever open for those ingenious men who are deprived of honours or of wealth.

Many men of genius must arise before a particular man of genius can appear.

Quotations, like much better things, has its abuses.

The Self-Educated are marked by stubborn peculiarities.

The act of contemplation then creates the thing created.

The defects of great men are the consolation of the dunces.

The delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age.

The golden hour of invention must terminate like other hours, and when the man of genius returns to the cares, the duties, the vexations, and the amusements of life, his companions behold him as one of themselves - the creature of habits and infirmities.

The most noble criticism is that in which the critic is not the antagonist so much as the rival of the author.

The wise make proverbs, and fools repeat them.

Their chief residence was Bagdad, where they remained until the eleventh century, an age fatal in Oriental history, from the disasters of which the Princes of the Captivity were not exempt.

Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised.

Time the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor.

To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius - the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.

A circle may be small yet it may be as mathematically beautiful and perfect as a large one.

If the golden gate of preferment is not usually opened to men of real merit persons of no worth have entered it in a most extraordinary manner.

A great work always leaves us in a state of musing.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

In my fifty years of experience and memory, I have seen the most amazing increase in the standard of living of a people ever achieved anywhere in the world. This is why I am so sure that our system of free competition and industrial development is sound and must be preserved.

The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

It's been my experience that every time I think I know where it's at, it's usually somewhere else.