False friends are like our shadow, keeping close to us while we walk in the sunshine, but leaving us the instant we cross into the shade.

Doubt whom you will, but never yourself.

Our first and last love is self-love.

The scope of an intellect is not to be measured with a tape-string, or a character deciphered from the shape or length of a nose.

It is the passion that is in a kiss that gives to it its sweetness; it is the affection in a kiss that sanctifies it.

We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.

The opinions of the misanthropical rest upon this very partial basis, that they adopt the bad faith of a few as evidence of the worthlessness of all.

The lively and mercurial are as open books, with the leaves turned down at the notable passages. Their souls sit at the windows of their eyes, seeing and to be seen.

Tears are nature's lotion for the eyes. The eyes see better for being washed by them.

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.

No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.

Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she always needed the most.

I mean, I don't like anyone who likes themselves too much.

To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone.

I can give you a six-word formula for success: "Think things through - then follow through."

A sister is both your mirror - and your opposite.

Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead.

I love that pre-mod jazz look of the late Fifties, the Steve McQueen style that influenced the British modernists.

Every ounce of information we can extract from a killer about his mind and methods gives us more ammunition to track the next one.

By faithfulness we are collected and wound up into unity within ourselves, whereas we had been scattered abroad in multiplicity.

With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.