In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.

What are men to rocks and mountains?

I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.

Obstinate, headstrong girl!

She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me, and I am in no humor at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.

You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.

I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.

Angry people are not always wise.

The truth is more magical - in the best and most exciting sense of the word - than any myth or made-up mystery or miracle. Science has its own magic: the magic of reality.

As she realized what might have been, she grew to be thankful for what was.

My father came from Germany. My mom came from Venezuela. My father's culturally German, but his father was Japanese.

I live in the constant newness of aspiration. Whatever I think, I ignore. Whatever I feel, I don't trust. Yet I listen to my thoughts and follow my feelings.

As soon as you become afraid to make a fool of yourself, you're in trouble. I decided I may as well just see if I can live with myself making millions of mistakes and learn something from it.

People want to be special. I think ambition can take in a whole package of things, power or sexual excitement.

We live in what may be the most anti-intellectual period in the history of Western civilization.

We stand up and proudly proclaim that Washington is not our caretaker and we reject a state, in Margaret Thatcher's words, a state that takes too much from us to do too much for us.

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

Modesty and diffidence make a man unfit for public affairs; they also make him unfit for brothels.