Obligation is the bitterest thraldom.

Recognized probity is the surest of all oaths.

Obstinacy is ever most positive when it is most in the wrong.

Make your best thoughts into action.

Order in a house ought to be like the machinery in opera, whose effect produces great pleasure, but whose ends must be hid.

For the honest people, relations increase with the years. For the vicious, inconveniences increase. Inconstancy is the defect of vice; the influence of habit is one of the qualities of virtue.

Fortune does not change [people], it unmasks them.

Women do not often have it in their power to give like men, but they forgive like Heaven.

A pure style in writing results from the rejection of everything superfluous.

One of the first observations to make in conversation is the state, or the character, and the education of the person to whom we speak.

It is never permissible to say, I say.

‎I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that is the only way of insuring one's immortality.

I've always had this feeling, " Henry says, "that all dogs are really therapy dogs.

Music proposes. Sound disposes.

We make our own choices, and then we present the matter to the Lord and get his approving, ratifying seal.

Of course, afterward, I studied [commentary on the Bible by a Rabbi Moshe Dessauer] more closely. But, in truth, it doesn't touch me. It doesn't change my attitude toward the text.

Boxing is the sport to which all other sports aspire.

My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind.

I am for marriage. I am for fidelity. I am for love, whether it's a man and woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man.

We learn through experience and experiencing, and no one teaches anyone anything.

We are weakened and we are tired, but we are not done yet.