Conflict, which rouses up the best and highest powers in some characters, in others not only jars the whole being, but paralyzes the faculties.

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.

Perception is like painting a scenery - no matter how beautifully you paint, it will still be a painting of the scenery, not the scenery itself.

The maddened four men followed frantically, for it is better to be in the presence of the awful than only within hearing. ("The Black Dog")

I am a man" he told her, "and men do not consume pink beverages. Get thee gone woman, and bring me something brown.

I'm the guy who will eat something that looks nice when I'm out, but when I take it home in a doggie bag, it'll sit in the back of my refrigerator until it starts to move.

You say a good cause justifies any war; but I say a good war justifies any cause.

I owe everything to this football. But I'm proud of what I've made of the opportunity to become a trainer.

I can't make a film that I don't feel comfortable with.

It doesn't much signify whom one marries, for one is sure to find next morning that it was someone else.

What we do to others will come back to us.

If you are creative, sometimes you give up a lot of things that other people have.