“Confidence in others’ honesty is no light testimony of one’s own integrity.”

I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.

Of all our infirmities, the most savage is to despise our being.

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.

The finest souls are those that have the most variety and suppleness.

The world is all a carcass and vanity, The shadow of a shadow, a play And in one word, just nothing.

There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly.

Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly.

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.

I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.

Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.

There is not much less vexation in the government of a private family than in the managing of an entire state.

I write to keep from going mad from the contradictions I find among mankind – and to work some of those contradictions out for myself.

The confidence in another man’s virtue is no light evidence of a man’s own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.

Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil’s alphabet – the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.

It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness. A spirited mind never stops within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength.

In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book.

There is a kind of a cascading chain, … If one can’t sell, then that business doesn’t buy and that means the next business doesn’t sell, and the previous business doesn’t sell, and so on.

If we remain determined to shape a new and better world of separate, sovereign nations, this new century will be a happier one.

Cats names are more for human benefit. They give one a certain degree more confidence that the animal belongs to you.

But I’m the only one who can paint the moon, because I’m the only one who knows whether that’s right or not.

When people are laughing, they’re generally not killing one another.

One day, though, I realized I was no longer a believer, and realizing that, I couldn’t go back.

You can begin to see an amalgamation of cultures, the real beginning of one world.

The one hour live debate in the West Wing that we did was one of the most exciting times for me on stage or on camera, because anything could go wrong.