“Success is a poison that should only be taken late in life and then only in small doses.”

Speeches easy to young speakers are generally very difficult to old listeners.

It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will support you when all other recreations are gone. It will last until your death. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.

Romance is very pretty in novels, but the romance of a life is always a melancholy matter. They are most happy who have no story to tell.

That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing.

Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded candle-ends of age.

When the little dog snarls, the big dog does not connect the snarl with himself, simply fancying that the little dog must be uncomfortable.

I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.

When once a woman is married she should be regarded as having thrown off her allegiance to her own sex. She is sure to be treacherous at any rate in one direction.

He should be cautious but never timid, bold but never venturesome; he should have a good digestion, genial manners, and, above all, a thick skin.

What is there that money will not do?

People will take you very much at your own reckoning.

There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily.

I judge a man by his actions with men, much more than by his declarations Godwards.

Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for change we sink to something lower.

When men think much, they can rarely decide.

Of Dickens’ style it is impossible to speak in praise. It is jerky, ungrammatical, and created by himself in defiance of rules…

I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O’Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.

It is true that when you smoke DMT, for example, at a sufficiently high and prepared dose, you get elves, everybody does. All you need do, is inhale deeply three times, and you know… You want contact? You want elves? You want alien contact? You’ll have that!

Does a being who requires meaning find meaning in a universe that has no meaning?

Success happened little by little for me. I tasted the flavor of fame in small doses: I started at 10 years old when I won a music contest; I was performing at birthday parties, company meetings.

I think we need a huge dose of love.

In America most everybody who’s Italian is half Italian. Except me. I’m all Italian. I’m mostly Sicilian, and I have a little bit of Neapolitan in me. You get your full dose with me.

Rather than us trying to change girls in order to fit into the common mold of what we think a CEO looks like.

CEOs of top companies could probably use a dose of not-asking-for-raise behavior and less self-entitlement.