There is nothing so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth.

A breeze came wandering from the sky, Light as the whispers of a dream; He put the o'erhanging grasses by, And softly stooped to kiss the stream, The pretty stream, the flattered stream, The shy, yet unreluctant stream.

Habit is overcome by habit.

The belly is the teacher of art and the liberal bestower of wit.

Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two months together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost Divine in its infinity.

Most of the things we decide are not what we know to be the best. We say yes, merely because we are driven into a corner and must say somethign. - Essays.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

To break training without permission is an act of treason.

You want to hear about insanity? I was found running naked through the jungles in Mexico. At the Mexico City airport, I decided I was in the middle of a movie and walked out on the wing on takeoff. My body... my liver... okay, my brain... went.

The secret of love is seeking variety in your life together, and never letting routine chords dull the melody of your romance. -Unknown love quote.

My mother said to me, "If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope." Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.

The fragrance always remains on the hand that gives the rose. -Gandhi.

Men are like steel: when they lose their temper, they lose their worth. -Chuck Norris.

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the goal.

Let a man turn to his own childhood -- no further -- if he will renew his sense of remoteness, and of the mystery of change.

Early and provident fear is the mother of safety.

Commemoration of Albrecht Dürer, artist, 1528, and Michelangelo Buonarrotti, artist, spiritual writer, 1564 We think of the early sacrifices of those early Christians; but what struck them was the immensity of their inheritance in Christ. Take that one phrase (surely the most daring that the mind of man ever conceived), "We are the heirs of God." That is what they felt about it, that not God Himself could have a fuller life than theirs, and that even He would share all that He had with them! Tremendous words that stagger through their sheer audacity! And yet, here we are, whispering about the steepness of the way, the soreness of the self-denial, the heaviness of the cross, whining and puling, giving to those outside the utterly grotesque impression that religion is a gloomy kind of thing, a dim, monastic twilight where we sit and shiver miserably, out of the sunshine that God made for us, and meant us to enjoy -- that it is all a doing that nobody would naturally choose, and refraining from what everyone would naturally take: a species of insurance money grudgingly doled out lest some worse thing come upon us.

You throw a perfectly straight line at the audience and then, right at the end, you curve it. Good jokes do that.