When you were born you were crying and everyone else was smiling. Live your life so at the end, your're the one who is smiling and everyone else is crying.

The best of life is conversation, and the greatest success is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people.

A poem, a sentence, causes us to see ourselves. I be, and I see my being, at the same time.

The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

I think that the heroism which at this day would make on us the impression of Epaminondas and Phocion must be that of a domestic conqueror. He who shall bravely and gracefully subdue this Gorgon of Convention and Fashion, and show men how to lead a clean, handsome and heroic life amid the beggarly elements of our cities and villages; whoso shall teach me how to eat my meat and take my repose and deal with men, without any shame following, will restore the life of man to splendor, and make his own name dear to all history.

Flowers so strictly belong to youth, that we adult men soon come to feel, that their beautiful generations concern not us: we havehad our day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.