“A mother who is really a mother is never free.”

If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man’s life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool’s notion of history.

We cannot confront solitude without moral resources.

The smallest flower is a thought, a life answering to some feature of the Great Whole, of whom they have a persistent intuition.

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.

True lovers know how trifling a thing is money yet how difficult to blend with love!

Nothing is a greater impediment to being on good terms with others than being ill at ease with yourself.

The more one judges, the less one loves.

The victory always has a lot of parents but the defeat is always an orphan.

When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.

Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph.

A mother’s happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.

Forgetting is the great secret of strong and creative lives.

One hour of love has a whole life in it.

He has great tranquility of heart who cares neither for the praises nor the fault-finding of men.

There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events.

I love kids with a passion I usually reserve for hot cheese, miniature chairs, and Prince concerts, but I feel no stress to reproduce simply because of a fear of withering eggs.

The difference between the child and the man lies chiefly in the unlimited confidence and buoyancy of youth.

The best way would be education and kids and all that stuff and then education and working education comes through. Then I started a music school and the music school now teaches kids to play the violin and the viola.

The whole dating ritual was different when I was a kid. Girls got pinned, not nailed.

I’m sad for adults who want to be children. And children who want to be adults.

I try to tell all the – not even the kids, even people older than me – to just be themselves. Don’t wear what I wear ’cause I wear it; wear what you like.

When I was a kid, my favourite time of the year when I was child was that magical first snowfall. I’d yell Yippee! Snow! and run up to the front door and shout You know the deal… You have to let me in now.

But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.