The greatest thing you can do for someone is to love them and show them how to love back.

Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.

One swallow does not make spring.

My attitude is never to be satisfied, never enough, never.

There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.

Economy is for the poor; the rich may dispense with it.

Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.

I find the medicine worse than the malady.

Diplomacy is to do and say the nastiest things in the nicest way.

A diplomat is a man who remembers a lady's birthday but forgets her age.

It was alway yet the trick of our English nation, if they have a good thing to make it too common. -King Henry IV. Part II. Act i. Sc. 2.

No nation, no matter how enlightened, can endure criminal violence. If we cannot control it, we are admitting to the world and to ourselves that our laws are no more than a facade that crumbles when the winds of crisis rise.

Where there is great love there are always miracles. -Willa Cather.

Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.

A great work is made out of a combination of obedience and liberty.

Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure... they govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.

Too long a sacrifice/ Can make a stone of the heart. -William Butler Yeats.

Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.

Can you remember when you didn't want to sleep? Isn't it inconceivable? I guess the definition of adulthood is that you want to sleep.

Ceremony and ritual spring from our heart of hearts: those who govern us know it well, for they would sooner deny us bread than dare alter the observance of tradition.