Dignity and love do not blend.

Recognized probity is the surest of all oaths.

Obstinacy is ever most positive when it is most in the wrong.

Make your best thoughts into action.

Order in a house ought to be like the machinery in opera, whose effect produces great pleasure, but whose ends must be hid.

For the honest people, relations increase with the years. For the vicious, inconveniences increase. Inconstancy is the defect of vice; the influence of habit is one of the qualities of virtue.

Fortune does not change [people], it unmasks them.

Women do not often have it in their power to give like men, but they forgive like Heaven.

A pure style in writing results from the rejection of everything superfluous.

One of the first observations to make in conversation is the state, or the character, and the education of the person to whom we speak.

It is never permissible to say, I say.

To live was to be a fragment of the cosmere that was experiencing itself.

And if your friend does evil to you, say to him, ''I forgive you for what you did to me, but how can I forgive you for what you did to yourself?

One of the secrets of a long and fruitful life is to forgive everybody everything everynight before you go to bed.

What came first the chicken or the dickhead?

...it is fifty percent what they see, and fifty percent what they think they see.

Where there is no freedom of speech, there is no conscience.

I come from the Lynchs of Sligo. You know, I went there, but I looked in the phone book and there are nine million Lynches in Sligo.

I do not admit that my doctrine can be judged by anyone.

I'm in favor of doing tax reform, but I think tax reform ought to be revenue neutral as it was back during the [Ronald] Reagan years. We've resolved this issue.

Virtually every discipline and endeavor is presently under a naturalistic pall.