Men are the sport of circumstances when it seems circumstances are the sport of men.

I am about to be married, and am of course in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness.

For in itself a thought, a slumbering thought, is capable of years, and curdles a long life into one hour.

I have always believed that all things depended upon Fortune, and nothing upon ourselves.

This man is freed from servile bands, Of hope to rise, or fear to fall; Lord of himself, though not of lands, And leaving nothing, yet hath all.

America is a model of force and freedom and moderation - with all the coarseness and rudeness of its people.

'Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark our coming, and look brighter when we come.

I should be very willing to redress men wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, had not Cervantes, in that all too true tale of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.

Every day confirms my opinion on the superiority of a vicious life - and if Virtue is not its own reward I don't know any other stipend annexed to it.

In England the only homage which they pay to Virtue - is hypocrisy.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print. A book's a book, although there's nothing in 't.

If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.

I am acquainted with no immaterial sensuality so delightful as good acting.

Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.

Shelley is truth itself and honour itself notwithstanding his out-of-the-way notions about religion.

Let none think to fly the danger for soon or late love is his own avenger.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

A thousand years may scare form a state. An hour may lay it in ruins.

If we must have a tyrant, let him at least be a gentleman who has been bred to the business, and let us fall by the axe and not by the butcher's cleaver.

For truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.

The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth.

Colonel Otto, do you have a, perhaps, fuller and more detailed account than your preliminary one of why my Imperial Security building is now largely an underground installation? From a technical perspective.