Nothing is rarer than real goodness.

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.

Joel Cairo: You always have a very smooth explanation ready.Sam Spade: What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I reasoned as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

A child prodigy is one with highly imaginative parents.

Whenever the world throws rose petals at you, which thrill and seduce the ego, beware.

Your ultimate goal in life is to become your best self. Your immediate goal is to get on the path that will lead you there.

Yeah, my dad bought me a guitar when I was like 10, and I didn't really want it then.

Large, centralized organizations foster alienation like stagnant ponds breed algae.

Does [America] realize the meaning of every Iraqi becoming a missile that can cross to countries and cities?

People love that you're human and that we're frail and we face the same situations. Honesty tends to communicate with people better than standing up there like you have an 'S' on your chest.

I think I'm a prudent filmmaker.