Ignorance is the primary source of all misery and vice.

In everything the ends well defined are the secret of durable success.

All truly historical peoples have an idea they must realize, and when they have sufficiently exploited it at home, they export it, in a certain way, by war; they make it tour the world.

You can only govern men by serving them.

The universal and absolute law is that natural justice which cannot be written down, but which appeals to the hearts of all.

Written laws are formulas in which we endeavor to express as concisely as possible that which, under such or such determined circumstances, natural justice demands.

We need religion for religions's sake, morality for morality's sake and art for art's sake.

True philosophy invents nothing; it merely establishes and describes what is.

The beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself.

What is philosophy? It is something that lightens up, that makes bright.

If ignorance is bliss, there should be more happy people.

Love is a drama of contradictions.

He was thirteen that year, the age when children splinter off and abandon the old loves.

I understood drinking to be the gasoline of all adventure.

I earned my famous name.

A single star is rising in the east, and from afar sheds a most tremulous lustre; silent Night doth wear it like a jewel on her brow.

If two actors have an equal creative give and take between them, it translates beautifully on the screen.

I think in many ways the problem that my writing would have with an American reviewer is that Americans find difficulty very hard to take. They are inevitably looking for a happy ending.

Many men are loved by their enemies, and hated by their friends, and are the friends of their enemies, and the enemies of their friends.

Upon consideration of the central question of the moon's toughness there can be little doubt. It is hella tough.

I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.