The force we use on ourselves, to prevent ourselves from loving, is often more cruel than the severest treatment at the hands of one loved.

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.

Notice I did not say what people can do--what we can do is merely a consequence of what we can be.

Just because we’ve made poor or wrong choices in the past, does not limit us from making wise and good choices now.

These are hard memories, and I will save the rest of the story for another time.

I think almost everything important that's ever happened was unimaginable shortly before it happened. Good things and bad things: ending slavery, ending child labor, women voting, etc.

Poetry is in itself strength and joy, whether it be crowned by all mankind, or left alone in its own magic hermitage.

My life is in the hands of any fool who makes me lose my temper.

[People] want to feel superior, so they imagine we're Bible thumpers and uneducated and all that.

Humanity's greatest challenge may soon be just making it to the next harvest.

Art is not just to show life as it is, but to show life as it should be.

I came hither [Craigenputtoch] solely with the design to simplify my way of life and to secure the independence through which I could be enabled to remain true to myself.