A friend in power is a friend lost.

No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.

He never labored so hard to learn a language as he did to hold his tongue, and it affected him for life. The habit of reticence — of talking without meaning — is never effaced.

The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.

The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.

The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.

Philosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

He supposed that, except musicians, every one thought Beethoven a bore, as every one except mathematicians thought mathematics a bore.

A halo surrounded the grim reaper nun, Sister Maria. (By the way-I like this human idea of the grim reaper. I like the scythe. It amuses me.)

Never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully and imaginatively for its hidden assets.

Episcopalians are pretty thin on the ground in the central United States.

In for ever knowing, we are for ever blessed; but to know all were the curse of a fiend

As long as one has a garden, one has a future. As long as one has a future, one is alive.

I feel being an actress is probably not half as difficult as being a mother, and I do not know when I will be ready for that kind of a decision.

I sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said.

On singing in the swimming pool: "If I can move the water, I can move the people.

Remember that when you truly want something, the entire Universe conspires to make it happen.

Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. This limbo and dust-hole of thought is presided over by a certain reason, too.