Kings do with men as with pieces of money; they give them what value they please, and we are obliged to receive them at their current and not at their real value.

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.

So the unwanting soulsees what's hidden, and the ever-wanting soulsees only what it wants.

The experience of poetry could bring my mother back to me. Poetry offers a different kind of solace - here on earth.

The tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.

Distance does not break off the friendship absolutely, but only the activity of it.

What the Muslim Brotherhood said in the explanatory memorandum that was discovered during the Holy Land Foundation Trial was that, "they will take advantage of our PC attitude to get us".

I've chosen to stay in a jolly place for most of my life, and that is a lot of who I am.

Sometimes the problem outshines the pain.

Creativity is not to be rudely shoved into being

I want to lift the audience to the miraculous in human nature. After all, we shouldn't be here, with all the odds against us in nature. It's kind of unusual and wonderful!

That's the great advantage of being a foreigner: you're not paying your dues, but you are getting all the benefits.