The contemplative life is often miserable. One must act more, think less, and not watch oneself live.

Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.

The person is always happy who is in the presence of something they cannot know in full. A person as advanced far in the study of morals who has mastered the difference between pride and vanity.

Do you think that revolutions are made with rose water?

Whatever evil a man may think of women, there is no woman but thinks more.

The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society.

Nature never said to me: Do not be poor; still less did she say: Be rich; her cry to me was always: Be independent.

There are two things that one must get used to or one will find life unendurable: the damages of time and injustices of men.

If it were not for the government, we should have nothing to laugh at in France.

Some things are easier to legalize than to legitimate.

One must not hope to be more than one can be.

It is commonly supposed that the art of pleasing is a wonderful aid in the pursuit of fortune; but the art of being bored is infinitely more successful.

There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools.

There are certain times when public opinion is the worst of all opinions.

The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless.

There are more people who wish to be loved than there are who are willing to love.

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.

Change of fashion is the tax levied by the industry of the poor on the vanity of the rich.

The contemplative life is often miserable. One must act more, think less, and not watch oneself live.

Celebrity is the advantage of being known to people who we don't know, and who don't know us.

Philosophy, like medicine, has plenty of drugs, few good remedies, and hardly any specific cures.

All passions exaggerate; and they are passions only because they do exaggerate.

When a man and a woman have an overwhelming passion for each other, it seems to me, in spite of such obstacles dividing them as parents or husband, that they belong to each other in the name of Nature, and are lovers by Divine right, in spite of human convention or the laws.

Man may aspire to virtue, but he cannot reasonably aspire to truth.

Scandal is an importunate wasp, against which we must make no movement unless we are quite sure that we can kill it; otherwise it will return to the attack more furious than ever.

Man arrives as a novice at each age of his life.

Conviction is the conscience of the mind.

Real worth requires no interpreter: its everyday deeds form its emblem.

Preoccupation with money is the great test of small natures, but only a small test of great ones.

The most wasted day is that in which we have not laughed.

Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.

Swallow a toad in the morning and you will encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day.

By Rice's own standards, the war was well underway by the time he took office. He was a war president the moment he took the oath. But did he act like one?

Under current law volunteers who are not working with an official nonprofit organization are not covered by the Volunteer Protection Act. Therefore, there are absolutely no legal protections for the average American who wishes to volunteer.

Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.

I still feel that a movie has to attempt to say something - even if it fails miserably. But I've sort of given up on believing that I'm going to change the world with every film I choose to act in.

I knew I wanted to act, and I was really driven, so I kept going for it. We moved to L.A. full-time when I was 8 or 9.

Maybe I can't act, but I know the gimmicks. I studied acting all my life and know what's good for me.

I've done a lot of acting. I'm not saying I'm the greatest, but I'd love to act, I'd love to sing.

P.C. is just too Big Brother - telling me how I should act and feel.

Act well your part, there all the honour lies.

I'm a 7 o'clock act. My people want to go to a show, a dinner and then go home and go to bed.

For me, romance isn't an over-the-top act. It's someone offering to help and to support me. Or if that person thinks I'm making the wrong decision, he'll tell me. I want him to be honest, because being that honest takes a lot of guts.

I want more children but for the next three years I want to act.

I have to say that it's very few countries that are willing to look back at its past and apologize for its act, or make amends for its act, as the United States had one.

I think unleashing 3,000 smart bombs against the city of Baghdad in the first several days of the war... to me, if those were unleashed against the San Francisco Bay Area, I would call that an act of extreme terrorism.

I cannot sing, dance or act; what else would I be but a talk show host.

My kids act all the time and it's exactly what I used to do.

After the magical act accomplished by Joyce with Ulysses, perhaps we are getting away from it.