Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I'll tell you who you are.

Happiness does not await us all. One needn't be a prophet to say that there will be more grief and pain than serenity and money. That is why we must hang on to one another.

Flies purify the air, and plays - the morals.

Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.

God's world is a good place. The one thing not good in it is we. How little justice and humility there is in us. How little we understand true patriotism!

Just as I shall lie alone in the grave, so, in essence, do I live alone.

It's easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.