Love is the only possession which we can carry with us beyond the grave.

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.

A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.

It is better to help an enemy than to harm a friend.

Never give up on what you really want to do. The person with big dreams is more powerful than the one with all the facts.

Parents were the only ones obligated to love you; from the rest of the world you had to earn it.

I remember being young in the 1960s. We had a great sense of the future, a great big hope. This is what is missing in the youth today. This being able to dream and to change the world.

Every man harbors an inner female territory ruled by his mother, from whom he can never entirely break free.

I try to imitate on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes.

When I did 'The Social Network,' David Fincher told me that I managed to make a thankless character pretty awesome. I thought that was really cool because I think he's really cool.

I liked your opera. I think I will set it to music.

To be a 'believer' does not make you superior to others; but to be a 'humanist' does make it so!