“If a man deceives me once, shame on him; if he deceives me twice, shame on me.”

I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.

A man’s grammar, like Caesar’s wife, should not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.

To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths!

And so being young and dipped in folly I fell in love with melancholy.

All that we see and seem is but a dream within a dream.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

Lord, help my poor soul.

Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.

Deep in earth my love is lying and I must weep alone.

And I fell violently on my face.

Art is to look at not to criticize.

The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame.

To elevate the soul, poetry is necessary.

Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.

In efforts to soar above our nature, we invariably fall below it.

I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

There is also an age-old excuse: “The devil made me do it.” Not so! He can deceive you and mislead you, but he does not have the power to force you or anyone else to transgress or to keep you in transgression.

You may not like what you find. In that case you are entitled to try to change it. But do not deceive yourself as to what you do find to be the facts of the situation.

Let us not deceive ourselves: we must elect world peace or world destruction.

There is no more lively sensation than that of pain; its impressions are certain and dependable, they never deceive as may those of the pleasure women perpetually feign and almost never experience.

To say that private men have nothing to do with government is to say that private men have nothing to do with their own happiness or misery; that people ought not to concern themselves whether they be naked or clothed, fed or starved, deceived or instructed, protected or destroyed.

Men who can succeed in deceiving no one else, will succeed at last in deceiving themselves.

You can’t know your real mind as long as you deceive yourself.

Those who try to achieve success without hard work ultimately deceive themselves-or worse-deceive others.