It is as proper to have pride in oneself as it is ridiculous to show it to others.

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.

I just happen to comprehend the low standards of the majority of the music-buying public, and I don’t care how condescending that sounds, it’s true. They always go for the shiny gimmicks. Always.

I do not understand why reading the Bible in public should make others feel uncomfortable . . . it may be such an example that serves to remind them of the Book they have neglected.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

I was always making up rhymes. But I never thought that poetry would become my life.

And freedom is what America means to the world.

Wouldn't it be great if you could only get AIDS by giving money to television preachers?

Our farmers round, well pleased with constant gain, like other farmers, flourish and complain.

I look around for the friends I used to turn to pull me through. Looking into their eyes, I see them running, too.

Men and women serving in the military deserve better than what they're giving - what we're giving them. They don't know what they're going to be doing tomorrow.