“Know you not that you are my sun by day, and my star by night? By my faith! I was in deepest darkness till you appeared and illuminated all.”

A weakened mind always sees everything through a black veil. The soul makes its own horizons; your soul is dark, which is why you see such a cloudy sky.

I do not often laugh, sir, as you may perceive by the air of my countenance; but nevertheless, I retain the privilege of laughing when I please.

In business, sir, one has no friends, only correspondents.

Business? It’s quite simple; it’s other people’s money.

I do not cling to life sufficiently to fear death.

I’m sure you’re very nice, but you’d be even nicer if you went away.

True love always makes a man better, no matter who the woman is that inspires it.

Remember that what has once been done may be done again.

For there are two distinct sorts of ideas: Those that proceed from the head and those that emanate from the heart.

Wait and hope!

Women are never so strong as after their defeat.

Yet man will never be perfect until he learns to create and destroy; he does know how to destroy, and that is half the battle.

It was like the eve of a battle; the hearts beat, the eyes laughed, and they felft that the life they were perhaps going to lose, was after all, a good thing.

God is always the last resource.

True, I have raped history, but it has produced some beautiful offspring.

If God were suddenly condemned to live the life which He has inflicted upon men, He would kill Himself.

To see is one thing; to picture or visualise is another. A person can see things, only when his eyes are open, and when his surroundings are illuminated; but he can have pictures in his mind’s eye, when his eyes are shut and when the world is dark.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

Towards the end of February 1928, I took the decision of using brilliant monochromatic illumination obtained by the aid of the commercially available mercury arcs sealed in quartz tubes.

How can we manage to illuminate the pathos of our lives?

Thus any increase of outward splendor is usually a sign of a decrease in inward illumination

This is the great object held out by this association; and the means of attaining it is illumination, enlightening the understanding by the sun of reason which will dispell the clouds of superstition and of prejudice.

It was the full conviction of this, and of what could be done,

And of all illumination which human reason can give, none is comparable to the discovery of what we are, our nature, our obligations, what happiness we are capable of, and what are the means of attaining it.