A pure style in writing results from the rejection of everything superfluous.

Recognized probity is the surest of all oaths.

Obstinacy is ever most positive when it is most in the wrong.

Make your best thoughts into action.

Order in a house ought to be like the machinery in opera, whose effect produces great pleasure, but whose ends must be hid.

For the honest people, relations increase with the years. For the vicious, inconveniences increase. Inconstancy is the defect of vice; the influence of habit is one of the qualities of virtue.

Fortune does not change [people], it unmasks them.

Women do not often have it in their power to give like men, but they forgive like Heaven.

One of the first observations to make in conversation is the state, or the character, and the education of the person to whom we speak.

It is never permissible to say, I say.

How immense to us appear the sins we have not committed.

Someone died today. Someone was born today. It's not just a day—it's a moment.

...very lonely and, often, very unhappy, with the poignant misery that comes to lonely people who long to be social and cannot, somehow, step naturally and unselfconsciously into some friendly group

I'm so proud of you that it makes me proud of me. I hope you know that.

I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom.”“You call that freedom?”“To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.

By learning you will teach by teaching you will learn.

I was at the birth of my two girls.

When there's time for whistling, there's a lot of time on a show.

I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office.

The general rule is that my life is focused on the present, and very little on the past. If anything, I'm a little bit more focused toward the future.

I'm sad that there no more mysterious places in the world.