“Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.”

Wit never appears to greater advantage than when it is successfully exerted to relieve from a dilemma, palliate a deficiency, or cover a retreat.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

When we get tired of enjoying all the pleasures within our reach, we have still a resource in thinking of others that are not.

Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.

The cheerful live longest in years, and afterwards in our regards. Cheerfulness is the off-shoot of goodness.

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.

Winter is the night of vegetation.

A profusion of fancies and quotations is out of place in a love-letter. True feeling is always direct, and never deviates into by-ways to cull flowers of rhetoric.

What we call conscience in many instances, is only a wholesome fear of the law.

There is great beauty in going through life without anxiety or fear. Half our fears are baseless, and the other half discreditable.

There is probably no hell for authors in the next world – they suffer so much from critics and publishers in this.

Kindred weaknesses induce friendships as often as kindred virtues.

The heart contracts as the pocket expands.

Hope is the best part of our riches.

Alas, the transports beauty can inspire!

The small courtesies sweeten life; the greater ennoble it.

Fire and ice, somehow existing together without destroying each other. More proof that I belonged with him.

I think there’s so much feeling among young girls where they feel like they have to be this perfect thing – and they don’t. Perfect people don’t exist. Sometimes people need to be told it.

Whatever it is however bad I’m so glad you’re still here.

Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

God’s only excuse is that he does not exist.

Images exist; things themselves are images… Images constantly act on and react to one another, produce and consume. There is no difference between images, things and movement.

I feel as I always have, that the earth is the home and the only home of man, and I am convinced that whatever he is to get out of his existence he must get while he is here.