Winston Churchill

They are decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

The latest refinements of science are linked with the cruelties of the Stone Age.

Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice. Injuries are revenged; crimes are avenged.

Our houses are such unwieldy property that we are often imprisoned rather than housed by them.

We rarely find anyone who can say he has lived a happy life, and who, content with his life, can retire from the world like a satisfied guest.

Wickedness is always easier than virtue, for it takes a short cut to everything.

We are wiser than we know.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

Nothing is pleasant that is not spiced with variety.

Don’t think of yourself as indispensable or infallible. As Charles De Gaulle said, the cemeteries of the world are full of indispensable men.

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day.

Haste makes Work which Caution prevents.

Images also help me find and realise ideas. I look at hundreds of very different, contrasting images and I pinch details from them, rather like people who eat from other people

The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding.

He hates chess. He says it is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something clever when they are only wasting their time.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.