“A thousand years may scare form a state. An hour may lay it in ruins.”

Hearts will break – yet brokenly, live on.

Why I came here, I know not; where I shall go it is useless to inquire – in the midst of myriads of the living and the dead worlds, stars, systems, infinity, why should I be anxious about an atom?

Always laugh when you can; it is cheap medicine. Merriment is a philosophy not well understood. It is the sunny side of existence.

Till taught by pain, men know not water’s worth.

What an antithetical mind! – tenderness, roughness – delicacy, coarseness – sentiment, sensuality – soaring and groveling, dirt and deity – all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!

Self praise is no praise at all.

I live, but live to die: and, living, see nothing to make death hateful, save an innate clinging, a loathsome and yet all invincible instinct of life, which I abhor, as I despise myself, yet cannot overcome – and so I live. Would I had never lived!

You gave me the key to your heart, my love, then why did you make me knock?

I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.

Tyranny is for the worst of treasons.

A timid mind is apt to mistake every scratch for a mortal wound.

Roll on, deep and dark blue ocean, roll. Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain. Man marks the earth with ruin, but his control stops with the shore.

Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, sermons and soda water the day after.

Man is in part divine, A troubled stream from a pure source.

Who then will explain the explanation?

It is when we think we lead that we are most led.

If you’re working 50 hours a week to try to maintain family income, and your children have the kinds of aspirations that come from being flooded with television from age one, and associations have declined, people end up hopeless, even though they have every option.

Television is 15 hour days. Movies are 18 hour days. And it’s 18 hours of doing not a thing.

I sleep nine hours every night, I have a little nap after lunch, and, if I’m going out for dinner, I sneak in an extra one before I head out.

TV is a hard job. You work 15 hours a day. People tell you what to do. I hate to do it.

If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter. Either that or you’re President Obama.

You do get really exhausted doing films. You work such long hours, and after a while, things can get out of perspective, just like if anyone’s tired, things get on top of them.

As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No … eight days a week.

The best things said come last. People will talk for hours saying nothing much and then linger at the door with words that come with a rush from the heart.