To write is a humiliation.

A strong foe is better than a weak friend.

The ancients understood the regulation of power better than the regulation of liberty.

The Americans have always been food, sex, and spirit revivalists.

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

The machine has had a pernicious effect upon virtue, pity, and love, and young men used to machines which induce inertia, and fear, are near impotent.

When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.

Every decision you make is a mistake.

Always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. Walt Disney Every decision you make is a mistake.

What most men desire is a virgin who is a whore.

The bad poet is a toady mimicking nature.

Men are mad most of their lives; few live sane, fewer die so. The acts of people are baffling unless we realize that their wits are disordered. Man is driven to justice by his lunacy.

Man hoards himself when he has nothing to give away.

So much of our lives is given over to the consideration of our imperfections that there is no time to improve our imaginary virtues. The truth is we only perfect our vices, and man is a worse creature when he dies than he was when he was born.

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

Genius, like truth, has a shabby and neglected mien.

We can only write well about our sins because it is too difficult to recall a virtuous act or even whether it was the result of good or evil motives.

It takes a long time to understand nothing.

Ambition is a Dead Sea fruit, and the greatest peril to the soul is that one is likely to get precisely what he is seeking.

To write is a humiliation.

Herman Melville was as separated from a civilized literature as the lost Atlantis was said to have been from the great peoples of the earth.

We cannot live, suffer or die for somebody else, for suffering is too precious to be shared.

A man who can be entertaining for a full day will be in his grave by night fall.

Now is the winter of our discontent.

Paul Poiret did wonderful things because he was so influenced by motifs, but Vionnet really understood the kimono and took the geometric idea to construct her clothes - and that brought such freedom into European clothes in the 1920s.

I'm a villain. But hey, villains have fans, too. They might have more fans than the heroes, and I'm OK with that.

If human is capable of conducting genocide no need for an asteroid to wipe out dinosaurs.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened.

I think you'll see if you look at 'Up', we've focused a lot on labor (and the forces trying to keep labor down) and have featured everything from Wal Mart workers, to on-the-ground organizers, to union presidents to restaurant workers sitting at the table sharing their experience and expertise.

Sometimes altering your position is the right thing. Sometimes it's not.

'Revolutionary Road' is a fascinating study of the human condition of a fragmenting marriage and the torment that these two people put themselves through in their efforts to try and find happiness and try and stay together, actually.

Where there are no rights, there are no duties.

The Marines have landed, and the situation is well in hand.

After I was discharged from the military, it was difficult trying to become a civilian.

I used to have a really big crush on Hayden Christensen.

I come from a family of business people, but I had the idea I wanted to become an artist.

There is no common sense in going to the field to fight and leaving a man at home to undo all that you accomplish.

Poetry begins where language starts: in the shadows and accidents of one person's life.

We keep passing unseen through little moments of other people's lives.

After 26 years, I am still practicing what I preach.

Coaching is helping people discover what they could not discover on their own so they can become what they want to become.

However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

There's a nastiness out there that wants to harm me with words. These are my enemies - the ideologues, the populists, the columnists who don't like the fact that I take them on toe-to-toe. What I try to do is tell the truth. It's not the coin of the realm in politics.

Work-life balance for founders doesn't look like work-life balance for everyone else. Starting a company isn't a nine-to-six job - or a nine-to-nine job, or a nine-to-midnight job.

For me, Lancome was more than just a brand. There was something very nostalgic about the name, about the whole story.

How could God allow cancer, poverty, the sheer unfairness of so many lives?