Just as we are often moved to merriment for no other reason than that the occasion calls for seriousness, so we are correspondingly serious when invited too freely to be amused.

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.

It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.

What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!

It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.

Our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage.

For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century.

No man pursues what he has at hand. No man recognizes the need of pursuit until that which he desires has escaped him.

There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance.

It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.

For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.

Every problem is a gift - without problems we would not grow.

I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo.

...And talking of the dear family party which would then be restored, of their mutual pursuits and cheerful society, as the only happiness worth a wish.

Mistakes are lessons by another name.

Denial does not change reality for everyone else. Only for the one denying and those who are foolish enough to believe the fantasy.

The greatest violence is seeing a child go to bed hungry.

I love only one girl, one in every town.

There's no reason the nation of Africa cannot and should not join the ranks of the world's most prosperous nations in the near term, in the decades ahead. There is simply no reason.

Fear is contagious. You can catch it. Sometimes all it takes is for someone to say that they're scared for the fear to become real. Mo was terrified, and now Nick was too.

I was five years old when I wrote my first song. It was out of longing for my father that I wrote it.