“Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.”

Of new acquaintances one can never be sure because one likes them one day that it will be so the next. Of old friends one is sure that it will be the same yesterday, today, and forever.

One can say everything best over a meal.

And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.

Character is not cut in marble – it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity.

Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined – to strengthen each other – to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

there are two ways of speaking an audience will always like: one is, to tell them what they don’t understand; and the other is, to tell them what they’re used to.

To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.

Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs.

Your trouble’s easy borne when everybody gives it a lift for you.

We’re playing our instruments probably more so than most people that I see play their instruments.

So efficient are the available instruments of slavery; fingerprints, lie detectors, brain washings, gas chambers; that we shiver at the thought of political change which might put these instruments in the hands of men of hate.

The audience is like my instrument. It’s not just me up there, it’s collaborative.

Attack your instruments. Don’t let them attack you.

You can be enticed by food, wooed by food, sex, money, or instruments.

I see man more as an instrument or an agent more than anything else.