Our impulses are our birthright. To alter personality would be unjust, almost criminal, for the impulses that make a fool or worse of us in certain circumstances may be necessary for our happiness.

It took me years to learn that character is fate and that no one can be made over.

[Alexander] Hamilton estimated portrait painters as thieves of time.

there is only one thing we do know and that is that we do not know anything.

To put a tempting face aside when duty demands every faculty is a lesson which takes most men longest to learn.

... France is the genius among nations.

Nowhere can it rain harder and with a more tiresome persistence than in California during the brief season when it rains at all.