“Ceremonies are different in every country, but true politeness is everywhere the same.”

People seldom improve when they have no other model but themselves to copy.

Man wants but little here below, nor wants that little long.

Law grinds the poor, and rich men rule the law.

Life is a journey that must be traveled no matter how bad the roads and accommodations.

Write how you want, the critic shall show the world you could have written better.

The best way to make your audience laugh is to start laughing yourself.

I love everything that’s old, – old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.

Every absurdity has a champion to defend it.

With disadvantages enough to bring him to humility, a Scotsman is one of the proudest things alive.

The company of fools may first make us smile, but in the end we always feel melancholy.

Modesty seldom resides in a breast that is not enriched with nobler virtues.

If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like whales.

On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting, ‘Twas only when he was off, he was acting.

The hours we pass with happy prospects in view are more pleasing than those crowded with fruition.

They say women and music should never be dated.

Hope is such a bait, it covers any hook.

Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress.

A woman, even a brilliant woman, must have two qualities in order to fulfill her promise: more energy than mere mortals, and the ability to outwit her culture.

I think that New York is not the cultural centre of America, but the business and administrative centre of American culture.

There is no hierarchy of values by which one culture has the right to insist on all its own values and deny those of another.

I take a cooking class everywhere I travel. I find it’s the best way to get to know a culture.

Human beings seem to hold on more tenaciously to a cultural identity that is learned through suffering than to one that has been acquired through pleasure and delight.

As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

in all cultures, human beings – in order to be human – must understand the nonhuman.