Avarice is to the intellect what sensuality is to the morals.

In morals, what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion, what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.

Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty.

Childhood sometimes does pay a second visit to man; youth never.

What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are. The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of mind, for the moment realizes itself.

All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the safe side and the just side of a question is the generous side and the merciful side.

As the presence of those we love is as a double life, so absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.

All government, all exercise of power, no matter in what form, which is not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny.

Nature and truth are one, and immutable, and inseparable as beauty and love.

To reason from analogy is often dangerous, but to illustrate by a fanciful analogy is sometimes a means by which we light an idea, as it were, into the understanding of another.

What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are.

The very names we use to describe ancient ideas or vanished forms of social organization would be quite meaningless if we had not known living men.

If you have no goals you will be bored: you will be unhappy because you are empty.

I don't have the will for singing but I must do it.

I think you know everything at eight. But is is hidden from you, sealed up, in a way you have to cut yourself open to find.

Any intelligent fool can invent further complications, but it takes a genius to retain, or recapture, simplicity.

I don't expect that Albert Gore is going to become president, and I certainly hope we never see Tipper Gore in the White House. Can you imagine Tipper saying, "Just say no"?

Success has many fathers.

...Let's get to the image as quickly as possible, let's get to the message even faster, and let's find the scale to knock you over the head with the image and the message.

I've always thought my flowers had souls.

Without my Johnson trademark mop of yellow hair, I think I would be nothing.