Earnest people are often people who habitually look on the serious side of things that have no serious side.

Genius and virtue are to be more often found clothed in gray than in peacock bright.

Magnanimous people have no vanity, they have no jealousy, and they feed on the true and the solid wherever they find it. And, what is more, they find it everywhere.

The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses.

No man should ever publish a book until he has first read it to a woman.

Better the fragrant herb of wit and a little cream of affability than all the pretty cups in the world.

It is not that the French are not profound, but they all express themselves so well that we are led to take their geese for swans.

Nothing is sadder than the consequences of having worldly standards without worldly means.

Nothing is so soothing to our self-esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us.

The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.

The instructed man is ashamed to pronounce in an Orphic manner what everybody knows, and because he is silent people think he is making fun of them.

A leader can lose his people if he does not know the problems they are facing.

A miracle is not the breaking of physical laws, but rather represents laws which are incomprehensible to us.

Like a fine flower, beautiful to look at but without scent, fine words are fruitless in a man who does not act in accordance with them.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.

An intelligent person should put money in the beginning, but not in heart

Extraordinary allegations require extraordinary evidence.

I'll be the light in the window.

The whole world is simply nothing more than a flow chart for capital.

Grandeur and beauty are so very opposite, that you often diminish the one as you increase the other. Variety is most akin to the latter, simplicity to the former.