Bad excuses are worse than none.

Reason and judgment are the qualities of a leader.

Too often it's not the most creative guys or the smartest. Instead, it's the ones who are best at playing politics and soft-soaping their bosses. Boards don't like tough, abrasive guys.

Glutton: one who digs his grave with his teeth.

Satire or sense, alas! Can Sporus feel? Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

He that hath a wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

Lower your voice and strengthen your argument.

I think I love and reverence all arts equally, only putting my own just above the others, because in it I recognize the union and culmination of my own. To me it seems as if when God conceived the world, that was Poetry, He formed it, and that was Sculpture, He colored it, and that was Painting, He peopled it with living beings, and that was the grand, divine, eternal Drama.

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

And soften'd sounds along the waters die: Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play.

The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only hold man's foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.

Oh Lord, forgive the misprints!

Thy spirit, Independence, let me share! Lord of the lion-heart and eagle-eye, Thy steps I follow with my bosom bare, Nor heed the storm that howls along the sky.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

To the rich man, Lazarus was part of the landscape. If ever he did notice him, it never struck him that Lazarus had anything to do with him. He was simply unaware of his presence, or, if he was aware of it, he had no sense of responsibility for it... A man may well be condemned, not for doing something, but for doing nothing.

There are two kinds of discontent in this world. The discontent that works, and the discontent that wrings its hands. The first gets what it wants. The second loses what it has. There's no cure for the first, but success and there's no cure at all for the second.

If the laws could speak for themselves, they would complain of the lawyers.

Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace. Leave gormandizing.

Can't never could do anything. Till could came along and whipped Can't butt... now can't can do a lot.