Gratitude is like the good faith of traders: it maintains commerce, and we often pay, not because it is just to discharge our debts, but that we may more readily find people to trust us.

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness, and others by sense.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.

Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.

Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.

Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.

There are no accidents so unlucky from which clever people are not able to reap some advantage, and none so lucky that the foolish are not able to turn them to their own disadvantage.

Jail has become the biggest mental health hospital.

Isn't it interesting that all of the biblical prophets and psalmists were poets?

Poetry is all nouns and verbs.

If there is to be any permanent improvement in man and any better social order, it must come mainly from the education and humanizing of man.

We have to get a lot tougher. If you get involved in a street fight, you can't lay down in the street and act like you're dead because they will kill you for sure. You might as well get up and fight.

We are meeting here to put an end to this cycle [of violence], to put things back in order and to put the wheel of peace on the right track. The task is very great, but our hopes are greater.

Well, once you get involved with bloodsport litigation, you can not only get drunk on your own greed but start to believe your own lies.

I'm glad that I get to take my final walk as the princess of 2012. ...there's nothing wrong with winning an Oscar!

He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, while he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.

Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.