Even virtue itself, all perfect as it is, requires to be inspirited by passion; for duties are but coldly performed which are but philosophically fulfilled.

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.

I have to live with myself and so, I want to be fit for myself to know.

When you're young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close-as close as you can get-to another person only makes it clear the impassable distance between you.

You have to move beyond that vision of the way your life has always looked and begin to picture your life as you want it to look.

I'm not in the service business.

Perfer et obdura; dolor hic tibi proderit olim. Have patience and endure; this unhappiness will one day be beneficial.

I'm very silly as a person, but quality silliness on-screen has more of an art to it. Harrison Ford, whom I was in Morning Glory with, has mastered that dry funny better than anyone.

Tho' Beauty is generally the creature of fancy, yet are there some who will be Beauties in every eye.

Lighting does occasionally strike and occasional the result isn't a corpse.

When he to whom one speaks does not understand, and he who speaks himself does not understand, that is Metaphysics.

I work between my heartbeat. I have one-and-a-half seconds to actually move. And at the same time I have to watch I don’t inhale my own work.