“A good book is an event in my life.”

To find love in Paris you must go down among those classes where the absence of education and of vanity, and the struggle for bare necessities, have allowed more energy to survive.

Power, after love, is the first source of happiness.

One-half, the finest half, of life is hidden from the man who does not love with passion.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.

It is from cowardice and not from want of enlightenment that we do not read in our own hearts.

Spring appears and we are once more children.

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

The difference breeds hatred.

There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.

What is really beautiful must always be true.

Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.

I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.

I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction,” said Mathilde. “It is the only thing which cannot be bought.

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

Give me a flagon of red wine, a book of verses, a loaf of bread, and a little idleness. If with such store I might sit by thy dear side in some lonely place, I should deem myself happier than a king in his kingdom.

I think sometimes what people miss about black people is that we’re complicated.

We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.

Oh, you who are trying to learn the marvel of Love through the copy book of reason, I’m very much afraid that you will never really see the point.

An event of colossal and overwhelming significance may happen all at once, but the words which describe it have to come one by one in a long chain.

Elvis Presley is all there is. There just ain’t no more. Everything starts and ends with Elvis. He wrote the book. He is everything to do and not to do in the music business.

This is beautiful indeed; the colored people have given this to the head of the government, and that government once sanctioned laws that would not permit its people to learn enough to enable them to read this book.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.