“Never speak ill of an absent friend.”

Your piping-hot lie is the best of lies.

Wisdom is not attained by years, but by ability

One eye witness is better than ten hear sayers.

No blessing lasts forever.

It is wisdom to think upon anything before we execute it.

You will not be a chip the richer.

For nobody is curious, who isn’t malevolent.

He who seeks for gain, must be at some expense.

It is good to love in a moderate degree; to distraction, it is not good; but to love to entire distraction, is the thing that my master’s doing.

How often the highest talent lurks in obscurity.

There’s no such thing, you know, as picking out the best woman: it’s only a question of comparative badness, brother.

Disgrace is immortal, and living even when one thinks it dead.

If you want to do something, do it!

I seek the utmost pleasure and the least pain.

Remind a man of what he remembers, and you will make him forget it.

It is much easier to begin than to end.

Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.

This is precisely different from the childish but common religious notion that even when you are alone there is always Someone Else present

Yelling and screaming won’t really get what I want from my kids.

Wise people build their lives around what is eternal and squeeze in what is temporary. Not the other way around.

I have to be a calmer person, because my anger can look pretty terrifying to a young person.

The worst reaction someone can have is, “eh.”

Security wins many battles but loses the security war.

Sometimes I feel that every word spoken and every gesture made merely serve to exacerbate misunderstandings. Then what I would really like is to escape into a great silence and impose that silence on everyone else.