Roger Ascham

During my life, I have had a few nightmares which happened to me while I was wide awake.

There is a difference between being convinced and being stubborn.

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

Five minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today.

Give me beauty in the inward soul; may the outward and the inward man be at one.

He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.

Behave so the aroma of your actions may enhance the general sweetness of the atmosphere.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

Knowledge is more than equivalent to force.

Only a stomach that rarely feels hungry scorns common things.

Although personally I am quite content with existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement.

The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.

Surely a long life must be somewhat tedious, since we are forced to call in so many trifling things to help rid us of our time, which will never return.

Studies perfect nature and are perfected still by experience.

We love to expect, and when expectation is either disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.