“We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.”

The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.

Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery – it’s the sincerest form of learning.

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

Animals are my friends and I don’t eat my friends.

He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you’ll find you’ve done it.

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

I’m an atheist and I thank God for it.

You see things; you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?

Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.

Your friends are all the dullest dogs.

Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby.

There is a collective as well as an individual humor inclining peoples to sadness or cheerfulness, making them see things in bright or somber lights. In fact, only society can pass a collective opinion on the value of human life; for this the individual is incompetent.

Life is but a collection of habits.

An Army is a collection of armed men obliged to obey one man.

But the universe, as a collection of finite things, presents itself as a kind of island situated in a pure vacuity to which time, regarded as a series of mutually exclusive moments, is nothing and does nothing.

I’ve got a great cigar collection – it’s actually not a collection, because that would imply I wasn’t going to smoke every last one of ’em.

I went to collect the few personal belongings which. I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.

A pretty little collection of weaknesses and a terror of spiders are our indispensable stock-in-trade with the men.

I have my little antique car collection, and when the weather is pretty I like to get out one of my old cars.