When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.

A compilation of what outstanding people said or wrote at the age of 20 would make a collection of asinine pronouncements.

We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.

Take away hatred from some people, and you have men without faith.

Excesses are essentially gestures. It is easy to be extremely cruel, magnanimous, humble or self-sacrificing when we see ourselves as actors in a performance.

Never have the young taken themselves so seriously, and the calamity is that they are listened to and deferred to by so many adults.

Those who feel guilty are afraid; and those who are afraid somehow feel guilty. To the onlooker, too, the fearful seem guilty.