“You can tirelessly keep on reading the same author, revere, admire, praise him, exalt him to the skies, know and recite each of his sentences by heart, and yet remain completely unaffected by him, as if he had never demanded anything of you and not said anything at all.”

“I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn't think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.”

“God has given you your child, that the sight of him, from time to time, might remind you of His goodness, and induce you to praise Him with filial reverence.”

“It's better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.”

“Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.”

“I wasn't afraid of him anymore, because I could smell his fear. You never had to be afraid of anything that was afraid of you.”

“When some one reminded him that the people of Sinope had sentenced him to exile, he said, "And I sentenced them to stay at home."”

“My father was a cool-tempered and unaffected man. Everyone who came in contact with him knew his straightforward way of acting, his scrupulous honesty; but few, very few, of his friends knew his noble and manly heart. Indifferent to praise and fame, as well as calumny, he was ever anxious to do good in silence; and it can be said of him, without fear of contradiction, that during his whole life he could never reproach himself with having been guilty of a bad or mean action.”

“If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything”

“The greatest player of the past 20 years? It has to be Zidane. He had everything. You never needed to tell him anything as he did it all by himself and knew what was expected.”