I have attended operas, whenever I could not help it, for fourteen years now; I am sure I know of no agony comparable to the listening to an unfamiliar opera.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. As in the words of Wayne Dyer, when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Sometimes to know with certainty that a particular thing is "true", will actually be the very thing that keeps you from attaining the things you seek to achieve.

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Whatever a man's age, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his button-hole.

I do love compliments, yet I'm often embarrassed to say what I think to the person when I get a compliment. I so often feel that they have not gone far enough.

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.