Actual aristocracy cannot be abolished by any law: all the law can do is decree how it is to be imparted and who is to acquire it.

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.

If there were only turnips and potatoes in the world, someone would complain that plants grow the wrong way.

Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.

Once we know our weaknesses they cease to do us any harm.

He who understands the wise is wise already.

Follow the rules until you make them.

So a good man can be a bad Christian?""I suppose so.""Then a bad man, " I said, "can be a good Christian?

I was thrilled when a designer shop assistant said I was a size smaller than Madonna!

My God, help me always resolutely to strive, and, through life and death, to force my way unto Thee.

Isn't that the problem? That women have been swindled for centuries into substituting adornment for love, fashion (as it were) for passion?

I believe that justices must recognize that our Constitution is an 18th-century document that needs to be applied in the context of the 21st century.

I do not believe in objects. I believe only in their relationships.

All talking is good, negative and positive. Stabbing is bad; talking is good.

Assertion is not argument; to contradict the statement of an opponent is not proof that you are correct.

Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can't get out of it on your own.