“Anyone may be an honorable man, and yet write verse badly.”

Birth is nothing without virtue, and we have no claim to share in the glory of our ancestors unless we endeavor to resemble them.

We should look long and carefully at ourselves before we pass judgement on others.

It is fine for a woman to know a lot; but I don’t want her to have this shocking desire to be learned for learnedness sake. When I ask a woman a question, I like her to pretend to ignore what she really knows.

I will not leave you until I have seen you hanged.

I have the fault of being a little more sincere than is proper.

She is laughing up her sleeve at you.

I might, by chance, write something just as shoddy; But then I wouldn’t show it to everybody.

The great ambition of women is to inspire love.

Cultivated people should be superior to any consideration so sordid as a mercenary interest.

Birth means nothing where there is no virtue.

I believe that two and two are four and that four and four are eight.

There is no protection against slander.

Too great haste leads us to error.

When we are understood, we always speak well, and then all your fine diction serves no purpose.

Rest assured that there is nothing which wounds the heart of a noble man more deeply than the thought his honour is assailed.

One cannot but mistrust a prospect of felicity: one must enjoy it before one can believe in it.

If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who’s coming along trying to create arts and write and compose and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race-give that child some help.

Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.

Honour is purchas’d by the deeds we do.

Lucky he who has been educated to bear his fate, whatsoever it may be, by an early example of uprightness, and a childish training in honor.

Pasteur will be celebrated almost as a God-like figure. This is when the moon completes her great cycle, but by other rumors, he shall be dishonored.

When the venerable pontiff’s hour has come, a Roman of good age shall be elected, of whom it will be said that he dishonored his throne though he held it long, with virtuous acts.

Honour sits smiling at the sale of truth.

We are now at the point where we must decide whether we are to honour the concept of a plural society which gains strength through diversity, or whether we are to have bitter fragmentation that will result in perpetual tension and strife.