Love is a boaster at heart, who cannot hide the stolen horse without giving a glimpse of the bridle.

But courage without conduct is the virtue of a robber, or a tyrant.

An audience of twenty thousand, sitting on its hands, could not have produced such an echoing silence.

Often beauty grows dull or common when speech breaks the mask.

One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.

We Persians have a saying that one should deliberate serious matters first drunk, then sober.

Tell a man what he may not sing and he is still half free; even all free, if he never wanted to sing it. But tell him what he must sing, take up his time with it so that his true voice cannot sound even in secret -- there, I have seen is slavery.