“While we are making up our minds as to when we shall begin. The opportunity is lost.”

Without natural gifts technical rules are useless.

A laugh costs too much when bought at the expense of virtue.

When we cannot hope to win, it is an advantage to yield.

It is much easier to try one’s hand at many things than to concentrate one’s powers on one thing.

The learned understand the reason of art; the unlearned feel the pleasure.

Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.

Sayings designed to raise a laugh are generally untrue and never complimentary. Laughter is never far removed from derision.

To swear, except when necessary, is becoming to an honorable man.

Give bread to a stranger, in the name of the universal brotherhood which binds together all men under the common father of nature.

If you direct your whole thought to work itself, none of the things which invade eyes or ears will reach the mind.

One should aim not at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand.

While we ponder when to begin, it becomes too late to do.

From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.

Satiety is a neighbor to continued pleasures.

We should not speak so that it is possible for the audience to understand us, but so that it is impossible for them to misunderstand us.

A man who tries to surpass another may perhaps succeed in equaling in not actually surpassing him, but one who merely follows can never quite come up with him: a follower, necessarily, is always behind.

Lots of people will protest that it’s quite unreal and that I’m out of my mind, but that’s just too bad.

I wouldn’t mind dying for France, but not for Air France.

Champagne on our lips and desire on our minds and you can leave those painful memories behind and you can bring your hand to my heart as we kiss. There’s nothing else but us on nights like this.

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.

He can who thinks he can, and he can’t who thinks he can’t.

Just make up your mind at the very outset that your work is going to stand for quality… that you are going to stamp a superior quality upon everything that goes out of your hands, that whatever you do shall bear the hallmark of excellence.

If you want others to like you, if you want to develop real friendships, if you want to help others at the same time as you help yourself, keep this principle in mind: Become genuinely interested in other people.

Superstition is the religion of feeble minds.