Great genius takes shape by contact with another great genius, but less by assimilation than by friction.

If you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

It must require an inordinate share of vanity and presumption, too, after enjoying so much that is good and beautiful on earth, to ask the Lord for immortality in addition to it all.

Sleep is good, death is better; but of course, the best thing would to have never been born at all.

Every man, either to his terror or consolation, has some sense of religion.

The deepest truth blooms only from the deepest love.

Money is the god of our time, and Rothschild is his prophet.

The swan, like the soul of the poet, By the dull world is ill understood.

Like a great poet, Nature produces the greatest results with the simplest means. These are simply a sun, trees, flowers, water and love.

Matrimony; the high sea for which no compass has yet been invented.

But I was brought up on convent morals and paternal nationalism, I was getting bogged down in contradictions.

When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.

There are no bad pictures; that's just how your face looks sometimes.

Every writer at the New Yorker is smarter than me.

Faith is the power to stand up to the madness and chaos of the physical world, while holding the position that nothing external has any authority over what heaven has in mind for you.

Now is the time when men work quietly in the fields and women weep softly in the kitchen; the legislature is in session and no man's property is safe.

Acting is the only thing I ever really wanted to do, and I'm really ill-prepared to do anything else.

I've never felt like I had anything important to say.

I still have pretty much the same fears I had as a kid. I'm not sure I'd want to give them up; a lot of these insecurities fuel the movies I make.

We are what the past has made us. We are what the future will make us. Live now. Right now.