“All round and round does the world lie as in a sharp-shooter’s ambush, to pick off the beautiful illusions of youth, by the pitiless cracking rifles of the realities of age.”

You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world…. We are not a nation, so much as a world.

A thing may be incredible and still be true; sometimes it is incredible because it is true.

The sweetest joys of life grow in the very jaws of its perils.

It is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject, and all subjects are infinite.

When the passage “All men are born free and equal,” when that passage was being written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves?

When among wild beasts, if they menace you, be a wild beast.

Only the man who says no is free

They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.

Truth is in things, and not in words.

One of the coolest and wisest hours a man has, is just after he awakes in the morning.

We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.

The most mighty of nature’s laws is this, that out of Death she brings Life.

The Past is the textbook of tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free. Those who are solely governed by the Past stand like Lot’s wife, crystallized in the act of looking backward, and forever incapable of looking before.

All deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea, while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore.

Ladies are like creeds; if you cannot speak well of them, say nothing.

Better be an old maid, a woman with herself as a husband, than the wife of a fool; and Solomon more than hints that all men are fools; and every wise man knows himself to be one.

You know, I grew up in two American internment camps, and at that time I was very young.

To tell a woman who is forty, “You look like sixteen,” is boloney. The blarney way of saying it is “Tell me how old you are, I should like to know at what age women are the most beautiful.

Men will surrender to the spirit of the age. They will say that if they had lived in our day, faith would be simple and easy. But in their day, they will say, things are complex; the Church must be brought up to date and made meaningful to the day’s problems.

My dear, old age is like an airplane flying in a storm. Once you’re in it there’s nothing you can do. You can’t stop a plane, you can’t stop a storm, you can’t stop time. So you might as well take it easy, with wisdom.

Men who have reached and passed forty-five, have a look as if waiting for the secret of the other world, and as if they were perfectly sure of having found out the secret of this.

Being seventy is not a sin. It’s not a joy, either.

It’s hard to find true love in the age of digital sex.

Why were you so old when we met? I answered with the truth: Age isn’t how old you are but how old you feel.