“Fortune, seeing that she could not make fools wise, has made them lucky.”

The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.

Tis the sharpness of our mind that gives the edge to our pains and pleasures.

Even from their infancy we frame them to the sports of love: their instruction, behavior, attire, grace, learning and all their words azimuth only at love, respects only affection. Their nurses and their keepers imprint no other thing in them.

I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.

Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

The finest souls are those that have the most variety and suppleness.

The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.

There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly.

Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly.

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.

I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.

Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.

There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind – and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

The confidence in another man’s virtue is no light evidence of a man’s own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.

I could have watched more film, that’s for sure. One advantage Joe Paterno had over me was that he didn’t play golf.

I wish we could be 100% shielded from danger, but nothing is in life.

I have heard endlessly that fish are so resilient that there is no way that you could exterminate a species. We are learning otherwise.

I count my blessings every day, quite honestly, because I take nothing for granted.

As a child, I was aware of the widely-held attitude that the ocean is so big, so resilient that we could use the sea as the ultimate place to dispose of anything.

I could never take orders from anyone.

I wish I could say I see my little brother more.

But I always believed that I could be something special. I just had to prove it to myself.