“I keep saying, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you are as obscure as life is.”

Below the surface stream, shallow and light, Of what we say and feel below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel, there flows With noiseless current, strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed.

Life is not having and getting, but being and becoming

If one were searching for the best means to efface and kill in a whole nation the discipline of self-respect, the feeling for what is elevated, he could do no better than take the American newspapers.

France, famed in all great arts, in none supreme.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence.

Ah, love, let us be true To one another!

Use your gifts faithfully, and they shall be enlarged; practice what you know, and you shall attain to higher knowledge.

Philistinism! – We have not the expression in English. Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.

For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.

Nature, with equal mind, Sees all her sons at play, Sees man control the wind, The wind sweep man away.

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.

Journalism is literature in a hurry.

Resolve to be thyself: and know that he who finds himself, loses his misery.

If an historian be an unbeliever in all heroism, if he be a man who brings every thing down to the level of a common mediocrity, depend upon it, the truth is not found in such a writer.

Greatness is a spiritual condition.

I do not believe today everything I believed yesterday I wonder will I believe tomorrow everything I believe today.

There’s no idea or concept in comedy you could do that hasn’t been attacked from some angle. But if you start leaving punchlines out so you’ll look cool, I don’t get that. But I don’t watch standup anyway, so I don’t know what they’re doing.

The whole idea of our government is this: If enough people get together and act in concert, they can take something and not pay for it.

There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good.

I was so in love with the idea of making people laugh for a living that I didn’t care what I had to do to get there. Or how much money I was going to make when I did get there.

They don’t like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle.

Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.

Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.

Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.