“I am a count, not a saint.”

God orders a man to do all he can to save his life.

I prefer the wicked rather than the foolish. The wicked sometimes rest.

The custom and fashion of today will be the awkwardness and outrage of tomorrow – so arbitrary are these transient laws.

If it is ones lot to be cast among fools, one must learn foolishness.

To save a man and thereby to spare a father’s agony and a mother’s feelings is not to do a noble deed, it is but an act of humanity.

The merit of all things lies in their difficulty.

All for one, one for all, that is our device.

Are there not some places where we seem to breathe sadness? – why, we cannot tell. It is a chain of recollections – an idea which carries you back to other times, to other places – which, very likely, have no connection with the present time and place.

Life is a storm. One minute you will bathe under the sun and the next you will be shattered upon the rocks. That’s when you shout, “Do your worst, for I will do mine!” and you will be remembered forever.

Youth is a blossom whose fruit is love; happy is he who plucks it after watching it slowly ripen.

To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others.

It is only the dead who do not return.

Capricious and unfaithful, the king wished to be called Louis the Just and Louis the Chaste. Posterity will find a difficulty in understanding this character, which history explains only by facts and never by reason.

Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss.

In love, writing is dangerous, not to mention pointless.

Tell the angel who will watch over your life to pray now and then for a man who, like Satan, believed himself for an instant to be equal to God, but who realized in all humility that supreme power and wisdom are in the hands of God alone.

Anyone who has ever walked upright has loved beer, celebrated over it, told talks over it, hatched plots over it, courted over it.

Why do we not care to acknowledge them? The cattle, the body count.

The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.

Fortunately, the courts discharged me every time after they understood what I had done.

I passionately believe that’s it’s not just what you say that counts, it’s also how you say it – that the success of your argument critically depends on your manner of presenting it.

The play will invariably be different and stronger, and much more fulfilling and richer on all counts. There’s no doubt in my mind about it.

When we feel sad, all we need to do is to count our blessings, no matter how few we notice.

Damn the rules, it’s the feeling that counts.