“Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life, of the times, of the manners, of the merriment, of the dress, the pleasure, the laughter, the ridicules of society. The old times live again. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?”

A person can’t help their birth.

People who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.

Frequent the company of your betters.

Bravery never goes out of fashion.

In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents, she was alone.

Next to eating good dinners, a healthy man with a benevolent turn of mind, must like, I think, to read about them.

There is a skeleton in every house.

Under the magnetism of friendship the modest man becomes bold; the shy, confident; the lazy, active; and the impetuous, prudent and peaceful.

Money has only a different value in the eyes of each.

Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?

If thou hast never been a fool, be sure thou wilt never be a wise man.

Next to excellence is the appreciation of it.

The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.

All is vanity, nothing is fair.

One of the great conditions of anger and hatred is, that you must tell and believe lies against the hated object, in order, as we said, to be consistent.

Revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural.

A man is known by his books, his friends and the mistakes he admits.

I’ve read the Bible. I think the Bible’s a great book, but it’s a novel. It’s beautifully written and la-di-da, but people really took it the wrong way.

Jesus needs neither books nor Doctors of Divinity in order to instruct souls; He, the Doctor of Doctors, He teaches without noise of words.

You can learn investing by reading books.

It does not say in the Bible that all laws of nature are expressible linearly!

I haven’t read any of the autobiographies about me.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.

I remember when I first started being in magazines, I had pretty thin skin. I was this nerd that read books and stayed home and didn’t go out.