The less you trust others, the less you will be deceived.

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.

No matter how long a shallow foundation supports a luxuriant structure, it will always collapse back to its thin rank, flouting out emotions.

The best preparation for tomorrow is doing your best today.

It's nice when you get to leave and travel and be busy and then come home.

And realizing there is no such thing as the Black experience. Time and events allow for change on both sides.

I think once you get it in your head, that you're not going to do anything bigger, you just do things that you enjoy, which has always been my ethos anyway.

When we didn't succeed at healthcare reform back in 1993, 1994, I went to work with Democrats and Republicans and we created the Children's Health Insurance Program.

I started playing ball when I was a kid. My dad was a pro ball player and he passed on his knowledge to me

I have need of a friend. There is one and only one who will give the air from his failing lungs for my body's mend. And that one is my love.

The real problem with stories - if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.

I don't consider myself just a black man. I consider myself a brotha. I love my people.