Life cheats us with shadows. We ask it for pleasure. It gives it to us with bitterness and disappointment in its train.

Musical people always want one to be perfectly dumb at the very moment when one is longing to be perfectly deaf.

I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.

Cleverness becomes a public nuisance.

I love to talk about nothing. It's the only thing I know anything about.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

I am sorry my life is so marred and maimed by extravagance. But I cannot live otherwise. I, at any rate, pay the penalty of suffering.