“They are never alone that are accompanied by noble thoughts”

“Better alone than badly accompanied.”

“I am sure of this, that by going much alone a man will get more of a noble courage in thought and word than from all the wisdom that is in books.”

“The very thought that war can ever be justified, let alone desirable or even noble, is quite honestly the greatest deception that mankind has ever forced upon himself.”

“I prefer the company of books. When I'm reading, I'm never alone, I have a conversation with the book. It can be very intimate. Perhaps you know this feeling yourself? The sense that you're having an intellectual exchange with the author, following his or her train thought and you accompany each other for weeks on end.”

“The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.”