Why does the past look so enticing to us? For the same reason why from a distance a meadow with flowers looks like a flower bed.

I look around me and nowhere do I see a stamp of disapproval with which nature marked a woman's candid brow.

Genius unrefined resembles a flash of lightning, but wisdom is like the sun.

The uneducated person perceives only the individual phenomenon, the partly educated person the rule, and the educated person the exception.

History is the zoology of the human race.

I love the pride whose measure is its own eminence and not the insignificance of someone else.

The character of the crowds is made up of mimicry and hostility.

Drink and be thankful to the host! What seems insignificant when you have it, is important when you need it.

Someone who is reluctant to say what he needs to say, often ends up doing so with an insolence whose crassness is proportionate tohis fear, once he gathers the necessary courage.

Piety is the fermentation of the forming mind and the putrefaction of the disintegrating one.

A woman's passion is not the measure of a man's love.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.

Every path has its puddle.

It was not until I got my first job, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and began playing chess with Don Gordon, a brilliant young theorist, that I learned economic theory.

The whole Melrose series is an attempt to tell the truth, and is based on the idea that there is some salutary or liberating power in telling the truth.

Happiness is a state of mind, so the real source of happiness must lie within the mind, not in external conditions.

the Lord does not so much look at the work that is done, as at the faithfulness of our hearts in doing it.

When you are a king, you may make as many ridiculous laws as you like. That is what being a king is all about.

It takes more than a college degree to make one a person of education. Any person who is educated is one who has learned to get whatever he wants in life without violating the rights of others.

Smaller stuff tends to get shared more frequently.