Birth is a shadow. Courage, self-sustained, outlords succession's phlegm, and needs no ancestors.

She who means no mischief does it all.

Deceit is the false road to happiness; and all the joys we travel through to vice, like fairy banquets, vanish when we touch them.

The man who pauses on the paths of treason, Halts on a quicksand, the first step engulfs him.

Reason gains all people by compelling none.

Mischief and malice grow on the same branch of the tree of evil.

Courage is poorly housed that dwells in numbers; the lion never counts the herd that are about him, nor weighs how many flocks he has to scatter.

Youth is ever apt to judge in haste, and lose the medium in the wild extreme.

Customs form us all, our thoughts, our morals, our most fixed beliefs; are consequences of our place of birth.

Union of hearts, not hands, does a marriage make, and sympathy of mind keeps love awake.

Man is the circled oak; woman the ivy.

Call no man happy until he is dead.

Realization hits you several times until you can't get up.

What we accept as reality is primarily a construction of our imagination.

Just above our terror, the stars painted this story in perfect silver calligraphy. And our souls, too often abused by ignorance, covered our eyes with mercy.

I don't like to have everything all worked out in my head because there's always a chance of it coming out different than you think it should anyway.

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.

Keep in mind the challenging fact that your aim is not to get ahead of others, but to surpass yourself; to begin today to be the person you want to be.

I'm lively when I perform and I always put everything into a show, but when I get home I love lying down in front of the TV and relaxing.

Solo artists are generally totally insane. Elton John? Slightly eccentric. George Michael? He's mad as custard.

Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at.