Poverty is only contemptible when it is felt to be so. Doubtless the best way to make our poverty respectable is to seem never to feel it as an evil.

False friends are like our shadow, keeping close to us while we walk in the sunshine, but leaving us the instant we cross into the shade.

Doubt whom you will, but never yourself.

Our first and last love is self-love.

The scope of an intellect is not to be measured with a tape-string, or a character deciphered from the shape or length of a nose.

It is the passion that is in a kiss that gives to it its sweetness; it is the affection in a kiss that sanctifies it.

We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.

The opinions of the misanthropical rest upon this very partial basis, that they adopt the bad faith of a few as evidence of the worthlessness of all.

The lively and mercurial are as open books, with the leaves turned down at the notable passages. Their souls sit at the windows of their eyes, seeing and to be seen.

Tears are nature's lotion for the eyes. The eyes see better for being washed by them.

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.

There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.

It was among the ruins of the capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised nearly twenty years of my life.

I'm not sure if music got a future. We have all these electronic ways to download and steal music and get music, but there's no money in makin' music.

Surviving a failure gives you more self-confidence. Failures are great learning tools - but they must be kept to a minimum.

We don't eat anything that has to be killed for us.

I have taken a wife, I have sold my sovereignty for a dowry. [Lat., Uxorem accepi, dote imperium vendidi.]

You can't love anyone that way more than once in a lifetime. It's too hard and it hurts too much when it ends.

When you play somebody's life, everything about your likeness, everything about the way you talk, whatever, has to become that person.

If I had to reduce the responsibilities of a good follower to a single rule, it would be to speak truth to power.