Work is the curse of the drinking classes.
I have, by long experience, found women to be like Telephus's spear: if one end kills, the other cures.
The essential function of art is moral. [...] But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.
Laughter is the closest distance between two people.
It is very fashionable for good-looking ladies to say how hard it is to be beautiful, but that's not true. There are times when it depresses and bothers me to see just how easy things are made for a beautiful woman.
There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snow-storm. We wake from one dream into another dream.
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts--the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art.
Sympathy means you feel like the other person, Empathy means you understand the other person.
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perpetual anesthesia - to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess.
Life is short and truth works far and long: let us speak the truth.
Academic education is the act of memorizing things read in books, and things told by college professors who got their education mostly by memorizing things read in books.
You do not inherit the earth of your ancestors, you borrow it from your children.
Cities are the abyss of the human species.
Woman was God's second mistake.
He who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet.
True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.
And the simple step of a simple courageous man is not to take part in the lie, not to support deceit. Let the lie come into the world, even dominate the world, but not through me.
Hell is truth seen too late.
In all lives, there is a date where destiny forks either towards catastrophe or towards success.
You can't escape destiny if it has beautiful eyes.
An idle brain is the devil's workshop.
Everybody's business is nobody's business.
Since a politician never believes what he says, he is quite surprised to be taken at his word.
The best jokes are those that life plays on us.
Beauty is power; a smile is its sword.
Sometimes it keeps us alive hope, sometimes habit, and sometimes fear. In the first case this is life, in the other vegetation, in the third hell.
A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.
People are capable of doing an awful lot when they have no choice and I had no choice. Courage is when you have choices.
A mother never realizes that her children are no longer children.
He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.
Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties.
A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way and shows the way.
The majority is never right, unless it includes me.
A man that should call every thing by its right Name, would hardly pass the Streets without being knock'd down as a common Enemy.
If someone is too tired to give you a smile, leave one of your own, because no one needs a smile as much as those who have none to give.
International law is that law which the wicked do not obey and the righteous do not enforce.
All the best songs are co-written by God.
If you take your kids too seriously, they'll drive you to drinking. If you don't take them seriously enough, you'll drive them to drinking.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.
Marriage is the operation by which a woman's vanity and a man's egotism are extracted without an anaesthetic.
A man's desire for a son is usually nothing but the wish to duplicate himself in order that such a remarkable pattern may not be lost to the world.
Everything is changing. People are taking their comedians seriously and their politicians as jokes.
Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Old age is far more than white hair, wrinkles, the feeling that it is too late and the game finished, that the stage belongs to the rising generations. The true evil is not the weakening of the body, but the indifference of the soul.
The cynic, a parasite of civilisation, lives by denying it, for the very reason that he is convinced that it will not fail.
