The more we feel sorry for ourselves, the less sorry others will feel for us. People don't waste their small store of sympathy on those who can provide it so richly for themselves.

Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden death.

Everyone is a bore to someone. That is unimportant. The thing to avoid is being a bore to oneself.

Those who have money think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know it is money.

Wisdom is keeping a sense of fallibility of all our views and opinions.

We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.

In a happy marriage it is the wife who provides the climate, the husband the landscape.

We confess our bad qualities to others out of fear of appearing naive or ridiculous by not being aware of them.

Old age takes away from us what we have inherited and gives us what we have earned.

The only test of work of literature is that it shall please other ages than its own.

Words are as recalcitrant as circus animals, and the unskilled trainer can crack his whip at them in vain.

Advice to son: Never confuse "I love you" with "I want to marry you."

Be careful about the advice you give, especially to your children.

I think that we're moving into this new phase of television where audiences are really embracing stories with a beginning, middle, and end.

(H)ope, be it never so faint, bringeth a gleam into darkness, like a little rushlight that costeth but a groat.

The war on drugs is identical to the prohibition of alcohol: all you're doing is making criminals rich and powerful.

Faith is the assent to any proposition not made out by the deduction of reason but upon the credit of the proposer.

Bad habits are our enemies because they hinder us from being the person we want to be.

Be the best of whatever you are.

Many billions of years will elapse before the smallest, youngest stars complete their nuclear burning and shrink into white dwarfs. But with slow, agonizing finality perpetual night will surely fall.

There just isn't any pleasing some people. The trick is to stop trying.