There are few men more superstitious than soldiers. They are, after all, the men who live closest to death.

To remember love after long sleep; to turn again to poetry after a year in the market place, or to youth after resignation to drowsy and stiffening age; to remember what once you thought life could hold, after telling over with muddied and calculating fingers what it has offered; this is music, made after long silence. The soul flexes its wings, and, clumsy as any fledgling, tries the air again

Thinking and planning is one side of life; doing is another. A man cannot be
doing all the time.

But I have noticed this about ambitious men, or men in power—they fear even the slightest and least likely threat to it.

It is harder to kill a whisper than even a shouted calumny.

The best way of forgetting how you think you feel is to concentrate on what you know you know.