Do not think that your Learning and Genius, your Wit or Sprightliness, are welcome everywhere. I was once told that my Company was disagreeable because I appeared so uncommonly happy.

There are few mortals so insensible that their affections cannot he gained by mildness, their confidence by sincerity, their hatred by scorn or neglect

In fame's temple there is always a niche to be found for rich dunces, importunate scoundrels, or successful butchers of the human race.

Who conquers indolence conquers all other hereditary sins.

Silence is the safest response for all the contradiction that arises from impertinence, vulgarity, or envy.

The quarter of an hour before dinner is the worst that suitors can choose.

The more you speak of yourself, the more you are likely to lie.

Idlers cannot even find time to be idle, or the industrious to be at leisure. We must always be doing or suffering

A moral lesson is better expressed in short sayings than in long discourse.

Suicides pay the world a bad compliment. Indeed, it may so happen that the world has been beforehand with them in incivility. Granted. Even then the retaliation is at their own expense.

Comedians are not usually actors, but imitations of actors.

For any human being, freedom is essential, crucial, to our dignity and our ability to be fully human.

Time after time during the next six months, he would put me together again.

The potatoes were starch grenades. The canned carrots were revolting because that is their nature.

Life does exist. It's the purpose that count.

Now a cholera epidemic was sweeping through Southeast Asia and south Asia in the early 1970s, so I started medical school and I joined a laboratory to work on this.

I have spent my life judging the distance between American reality and the American dream.

I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.

A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company

I like to write a lot of satire.

A really religious person has no theology. Yes, he has the experience, he has the truth, he has that luminosity, but he has no theology.