We must believe in luck for how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?
What really matters is the name you succeed in imposing on the facts not the facts themselves.
Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.
Real pain can alone cure us of imaginary ills. We feel a thousand miseries till we are lucky enought to feel misery.
Truth is a good dog; but always beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.
You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.
The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.
Pleasure is to Women what the Sun is to the Flower; if moderately enjoyed, it beautifies, it refreshes, and it improves; if immoderately, it withers, etiolates, and destroys.
The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows us to others, but hides us from ourselves.
Happiness, that grand mistress of the ceremonies in the dance of life, impels us through all its mazes and meanderings, but leads none of us by the same route.
Ennui has made more gamblers than avarice, more drunkards than thirst, and perhaps as many suicides as despair.
No man can purchase his virtue too dear, for it is the only thing whose value must ever increase with the price it has cost us. Our integrity is never worth so much as when we have parted with our all to keep it.
In life we shall find many men that are great, and some that are good, but very few men that are both great and good.
Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets.
It is an easy and vulgar thing to please the mob, and no very arduous task to astonish them.
To know the pains of power, we must go to those who have it; to know its pleasures, we must go to those who seek it: the pains of power are real, its pleasures imaginary.
The bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late.
It is only when the rich are sick that they fully feel the impotence of wealth.
Our incomes are like our shoes; if too small, they gall and pinch us; but if too large, they cause us to stumble and to trip.
Constant success shows us but one side of the world; adversity brings out the reverse of the picture.
Death and life have their determined appointments; riches and honours depend upon heaven.
Death and life have their determined appointments; riches and honors depend upon heaven.
Our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.
When you are laboring for others let it be with the same zeal as if it were for yourself.
If I am walking with two other men, each of them will serve as my teacher. I will pick out the good points of the one and imitate them, and the bad points of the other and correct them in myself.
The perfecting of one's self is the fundamental base of all progress and all moral development.
To practice five things under all circumstances constitutes perfect virtue; these five are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness.
We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament, and embrace it with passion, if we want to be happy.
The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
The coward wretch whose hand and heart Can bear to torture aught below, Is ever first to quail and start From the slightest pain or equal foe.
You say that love is nonsense....I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one's nerves like toothache orrheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.
I cannot give advice. How can I when I do not authorise success. I authorise it alright. Smile.