“Now it is a funny thing about life. If you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it. If you utterly decline to make do with what you can get, then somehow or other, you are very likely to get what you want.”

As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.

A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.

People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.

The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.

I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan’t make the mistakes I’ve made.

I wish I could make you see how exciting the life of the spirit is and how rich in experience. It’s illimitable. It’s such a happy life. There’s only one thing like it, when you’re up in a plane by yourself, high, high, and only infinity surrounds you.

The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?

If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved.

You’re intoxicated by the boundless space.

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.

The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.

The tragedy of love is not death or separation. How long do you think it would have been before one or other of them ceased to care?

I won’t accept anything less than the best a player’s capable of doing… and he has the right to expect the best that I can do for him and the team!

I’ll accept bad taste in a minute, as long as there’s some great comedy minds and performances.

I entirely concur in the propriety of resorting to the sense in which the Constitution was accepted and ratified by the nation. In that sense alone it is the legitimate Constitution.

When the people who are responsible for our country ask you a direct question, I expect them to accept a direct answer, not to be blackballed because you are telling the truth.

My ideas have undergone a process of emergence by emergency. When they are needed badly enough, they are accepted.

Relationships can be rather uncomfortable for her. But, as Eartha Kitt, it’s fine. I can accept and reject any time I want to. Do I ever reject? Not really. Although people think I do!

People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.

If we take science as our sole guide, if we accept and hold fast that alone which is verifiable, the old theology must go.