Love can be founded upon Nature only.

A liar begins with making falsehood appear like truth, and ends with making truth itself appear like falsehood.

The proper means of increasing the love we bear our native country is to reside some time in a foreign one.

Jealousy is the fear or apprehension of superiority: envy our uneasiness under it.

Deference is the most complicate, the most indirect, and the most elegant of all compliments.

Hope is a flatterer, but the most upright of all parasites; for she frequents the poor man's hut, as well as the palace of his superior.

We may daily discover crowds acquire sufficient wealth to buy gentility, but very few that possess the virtues which ennoble human nature, and (in the best sense of the word) constitute a gentleman.

A statue in a garden is to be considered as one part of a scene or landscape.

Virtues, like essences, lose their fragrance when exposed.

The difference there is betwixt honor and honesty seems to be chiefly the motive; the mere honest man does that from duty which the man of honor does for the sake of character.

The world may be divided into people that read, people that write, people that think, and fox-hunters.

It is not an opinion that "enhanced interrogation techniques" are torture. It is a legal fact. And it is also a legal fact that the president is a war criminal.

I know I am very beautiful.

You are softening toward the young rascal because he is ill, and because he says he likes cats." "It is an engaging quality, Emerson." "That depends," said Emerson darkly, "on how he likes them.

If you don't want the nickname, don't live up to it.

Genius is sorrow's child.

All the literati keep at least one imaginary friend.

I'd been living on the streets of New York, and I was sleeping at my friends' houses, sometimes in the subway.

George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.

Asceticism and celibacy can conceal many incapacities.

I think when you play a role, you always have to be a defense attorney for that character.