Respect is better procured by exacting than soliciting it.

Good-humor is allied to generosity, ill-humor to meanness.

Good-humor will sometimes conquer ill-humor, but ill-humor will conquer it oftener; and for this plain reason, good-humor must operate on generosity, ill-humor on meanness.

Despair gives the shocking ease to the mind that a mortification gives to the body.

Discernment is a power of the understanding in which few excel. Is not that owing to its connection with impartiality and truth? for are not prejudice and partiality blind?

To divest one's self of some prejudices would be like taking off the skin to feel the better.

Avarice starves its possessor to fatten those who come after, and who are eagerly awaiting the demise of the accumulator.

Envy is but the smoke of low estate, Ascending still against the fortunate.

Our companions please us less from the charms we find in their conversation than from those they find in ours.

What an argument in favor of social connections is the observation that by communicating our grief we have less, and by communicating our pleasure we have more.

A lively and agreeable man has not only the merit of liveliness and agreeableness himself, but that also of awakening them in others.

What else is life from the time you were born but a struggle to matter, at least to someone?

What Ann Druyan said: Compressed into a minute-long segment, the brain waves of a woman newly in love sound like a string of firecrackers exploding.

The first thing to be done by a biographer in estimating character is to examine the stubs of the victim's cheque books.

If you fire people, you fire customers.

Full of wiles, full of guile, at all times, in all ways, are the children of Men.

The Dharma is the truth that all natures are pure.

Bankers are lynxes. To expect any gratitude from them is equivalent to attempting to move the wolves of the Ukraine to pity in the middle of winter.

I nod like I’m listening,like we’re communicating, and she never knows the difference.

To be mad is to feel with excruciating intensity the sadness and joy of a time which has not arrived or has already been.

There are no guidelines for what happens when you get successful as an artist. My heroes were artists like Acconci, and he didn't make any money. That's what I thought success was.