“Folk whose own behavior is most ridiculous are always to the fore in slandering others.”

It is madness beyond compare To try to reform the world.

The defects of human nature afford us opportunities of exercising our philosophy, the best employment of our virtues. If all men were righteous, all hearts true and frank and loyal, what use would our virtues be?

The maturing process of becoming a writer is akin to that of a harlot. First you do it for love, then for a few friends, and finally only for money.

It is a strange enterprise to make respectable people laugh.

The more we love our friends, the less we flatter them; it is by excusing nothing that pure love shows itself.

Gold makes the ugly beautiful.

People are all alike in their promises. It is only in their deeds that they differ.

The genuine Amphitryon is the Amphitryon with whom we dine.

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.

Even Rome cannot grant us a dispensation from death.

A wise man is superior to any insults which can be put upon him, and the best reply to unseemly behavior is patience and moderation.

New-born desires, after all, have inexplicable charms, and all the pleasure of love is in variety.

All the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill in dancing.

Each day my reason tells me so; But reason doesn’t rule in love, you know.

The only people who can be excused for letting a bad book loose on the world are the poor devils who have to write for a living.

Ah, there are no longer any children!

If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.

A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

My theory was that what I had to do was make a study of human behavior.

The more refined one is, the more unhappy.

Behavior shapes emotions.

The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents, this isn’t wishful thinking. It’s the rule.

She refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring.

The art of being helpful is behaving as if everything we do matters – because we never know which things might.