“A wise man thinks it more advantageous not to join the battle than to win.”

There are few virtuous women who are not bored with their trade.

True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.

Hope, deceiving as it is, serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.

What makes the pain we feel from shame and jealousy so cutting is that vanity can give us no assistance in bearing them.

It is almost always a fault of one who loves not to realize when he ceases to be loved.

Everyone complains of his memory, and nobody complains of his judgment.

It is easier to know men in general, than men in particular.

We seldom find people ungrateful so long as it is thought we can serve them.

No man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.

Quarrels would not last long if the fault was only on one side.

The principal point of cleverness is to know how to value things just as they deserve.

We should often feel ashamed of our best actions if the world could see all the motives which produced them.

Some people displease with merit, and others’ very faults and defects are pleasing.

No man deserves to be praised for his goodness, who has it not in his power to be wicked. Goodness without that power is generally nothing more than sloth, or an impotence of will.

The reason why so few people are agreeable in conversation is that each is thinking more about what he intends to say than others are saying.

We would rather speak ill of ourselves than not talk about ourselves at all.

The bottom line for Republicans is this: The United States can have an open door without having open borders, but we cannot preserve the country we love by slamming that door in the faces of those who most aspire to join our nation.

Many Sunnis joined Islamic State because they felt they were being treated poorly.

There is always a secret irritation about a laugh in which we cannot join

Law and equity are two things which God has joined, but which man has put asunder.

To exclude anything that appears in your universe is not love. Love joins with everything. It doesn’t exclude the monster. It doesn’t avoid the nightmare – it looks forward to it.

Thinking which displaces, or otherwise defines, the sacred has been called atheistic, and that philosophy which does not place it here or there, like a thing, but at the joining of things and words, will always be exposed to this reproach without ever being touched by it.

Los Angeles is a city looking for a ritual to join its fragments, and The Doors are looking for such a ritual also.

When you write me into your story, don’t set my end in stone. Feel free to let me go. I’d like to join your story, but remember I have my own.