Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.

Affection

If you value a man's regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper -- and despise it.

Amusement

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

Arts and Artists

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Beauty

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but whoever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

Books and Reading

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

Cleverness

Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.

Convalescence

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

Courage

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

Creeds

I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.

Danger

In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.

Debt

The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

Dissatisfaction

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

Equality

Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.

Experience

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!

Faith

We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.

Fathers

My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately

Friends and Friendship

But a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

Gossip

The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.

Happiness

Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life.

Hatred

Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.

Hell

Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

Hope

He who has never hoped can never despair.

Humankind

Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.

Imagination

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.

Intentions

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.

Language

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

Liberty

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

Life and Living

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage.

Marriage

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

Men and Women

If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.

Mistakes

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

Money

Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness.

Motives

He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.

Opportunity

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.

Patriotism

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.

Pessimism

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself.

Poverty and The Poor

The seven deadly sins... food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.

Prayer

Common people do not pray; they only beg.

Progress

All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions.

Punctuality

Better never than late.

Questions

No question is so difficult to answer as that which the answer is obvious.

Respectability

Well, dearie, men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability. But you can't blame them for that, can you?

Riches

What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.

Self-Conflict

A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most. On Other Peoples Expectations: The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.

Shame

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

Song and Singing

When Satan makes impure verses, Allah sends a divine tune to cleanse them.

Success

Success covers a multitude of blunders.

Teachers and Teaching

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

Truth

Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.

Virtue

Better keep yourself clean and bright. You are the window through which you must see the world.

Wisdom

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

Work, Hard

When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. I didn't want to be a failure, so I did ten times more work.

Youth

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.