One has so much time for thought in the country! However occupied one may be, 'tis with nothing that engrosses the mind, which works away on its own account like a mill-wheel.

The effect of every burden laid down is to leave us relieved; and when the soul has laid down that of its faults at the feet of God, it feels as though it had wings.

How long time is when one is sad! Is it three years or three days since you went away?

The errors of the intellect are fatal, still more dangerous than those of the heart.

Certainly, friends are sufficiently rare not to be neglected; they are life's best comforters.

Kings may see their palaces fall, but the ants will always have their dwellings.

My God, how badly one calculates in this world! ... Let us leave off calculating on anything but death -- it is the only certainty.

One fancies that what one loves cannot die.

in God alone is love without tears, and of eternal duration.

Solitude causes us to write because it causes us to think.

Witticisms are fire-arms, that make a noise and give pain.

What the soul hardly realizes is that, unbeliever or not, his loneliness is really a homesickness for God.

The crazy thing about poetry is how its simplicity makes it complicated.

If you're sitting in that audience ready to fight me from the very beginning, I'm going to have a hard time getting to you. But if you've got a heart at all, I'm going to get it.

It's often wrong to write for specific actors because one ends up using what is least interesting about them, their mannerisms and habits. I prefer not to write for specific people.

... it's always determined characters who make the greatest fools.

I do not criticize people who take a public stand on human rights issues. I express my respect for them. But some people are more influential without a public confrontation.

I don't have dinner parties - I eat my dinner in bed.

For a million years the sound of making handaxes provided the percussion of everyday life. Anyone choosing a hundred objects to tell a history of the world would have to include a handaxe.

It is a simple feat of scientific electrical engineering — only expensive — blind, faint-hearted, doubting world.

If we're lucky we realize that life is really about family - your children, your family and your friends. Without that, the rest is hollow.