Nature is seldom in the wrong, custom always.

Civility costs nothing, and buys everything.

There is nothing can pay one for that invaluable ignorance which is the companion of youth, those sanguine groundless hopes, and that lively vanity which makes all the happiness of life.

People wish their enemies dead - but I do not; I say give them the gout, give them the stone!

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.

Nobody can deny but religion is a comfort to the distressed, a cordial to the sick, and sometimes a restraint on the wicked.

There is no remedy so easy as books, which if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind.

The ultimate end of your education was to make you a good wife.

There can be no situation in life in which the conversation of my dear sister will not administer some comfort to me.

I prefer liberty to chains of diamonds.

Solitude begets whimsies.

The courageous attitudes of leaders ramble around coward followers and sooner or later, they become courageous too!

I mean that success has come early. And that is dangerous. Always dangerous.

That's the way love sounds, my mother told me. You think it should feel like honey, but instead it cuts like a knife.

When I was a teenager in Iceland people would throw rocks and shout abuse at me because they thought I was weird. I never got that in London no matter what I wore.

A mathematical proof is beautiful, but when you're finished, it's really only about one thing. A story can be about many things.

When a secretary of state rakes in millions and millions of dollars trading access and favors to special interests and foreign powers, I know the time for action has come.

Write your Sad times in Sand, Write your Good times in Stone.

What place is so rugged and so homely that there is no beauty; if you only have a sensibility to beauty?

Pay your people the least possible and you'll get from them the same.

We all need to be huge supporters of the theatrical documentary.