You can only acquire really useful general ideas by first acquiring particular ideas . . . You cannot make bricks without straw.

Your own mind is a sacred enclosure into which nothing harmful can enter except by your permission.

Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.

There can be no knowledge without emotion. We may be aware of a truth, yet until we have felt its force, it is not ours. To the cognition of the brain must be added the experience of the soul.

Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.

The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one's sympathy the gloom of somebody else.

Worry is evidence of an ill-controlled brain; it is merely a stupid waste of time in unpleasantness.

It is easier to go down a hill than up, but the view is from the top.

The real Tragedy is the tragedy of the man who never in his life braces himself for his one supreme effort-he never stretches to his full capacity, never stands up to his full stature.

Of all the inhabitants of the inferno, none but Lucifer knows that hell is hell, and the secret function of purgatory is to make of heaven an effective reality.

Falsehood often lurks upon the tongue of him, who, by self-praise, seeks to enhance his value in the eyes of others.

We seek knowledge only because we desire enjoyment, and it is impossible to conceive why a person who has neither desires nor fears would take the trouble to reason.

I'm not at all an active feminist. On the contrary, I'm a bourgeois. I love family life, I love doing the same thing every day.

The theater of my mind has a seating capacity of just one, and its sold out for all performances.

We're (also) looking for a good people person who is able to motivate others and get strong performances out of people.

The whole aim of comparative anatomy is to discover what structures are homologous.

When you're a failure in Hollywood, that's like starving to death outside a banquet hall, with smells of filet mignon driving you crazy.

I'll just be out in the shed.

I stick to safe, controlled movement. If it's not safe, I just won't do it.

Animals are not here for our entertainment.

Hereditary wealth is in reality a premium paid to idleness.