Genius is lonely without the surrounding presence of a people to inspire it.

The first wild-flower of the year is like land after sea.

To be really cosmopolitan a man must be at home even in his own country.

It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass, only that he did not burn it afterwards.

How many lessons of faith and beauty we should lose, if there were no winter in our year!

Great men are rarely isolated mountain-peaks; they are the summits of ranges.

Do not waste a minute - not a second - in trying to demonstrate to others the merits of your performance. If your work does not vindicate itself, you cannot vindicate it.

What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, fixed in permanent outline forever?

How much that the world calls selfishness is only generosity with narrow walls,--a too exclusive solicitude to maintain a wife in luxury, or make one's children rich.

There is certainly no defence or water -proof garment against adverse fortune which is, on the whole, so effectual as an habitual sense of humor.

The most fertile soil does not necessarily produce the most abundant harvest. It is the use we make of our faculties which renders them valuable.

We cannot glorify God when we refuse to celebrate others

One ‘Magic Formula’ is for you to become your own best friend and your own biggest critic SIMULTANEOUSLY.

I like to say, in Hollywood, you can't make a redneck movie without me. That doesn't happen. You better not do it.

Some of Jimmy Stewart's performance in 'It's A Wonderful Life' is some of the most disturbing performance he ever did, when he falls apart and when he breaks down.

If you take control of your behavior, your emotions will fall into place.

Everyone wants to write a book. Very few people are able to do it.

There's only of him, she thought, and he's right here.

Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer.

I always had this energy level that made me want to come to New York.

To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty... and... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's... all irrational.