“First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity: no really self-respecting woman would take advantage of it.”
“You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.”
“I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.”
“In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.”
“The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be n hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.”
“The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.”
“The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.”
“In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than to win.”
“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.”
“Well, dearie, men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability. But you can't blame them for that, can you?”
“We mustn't be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class.”
“It is easy -- terribly easy -- to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work.”
“That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.”
“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.”
“Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself thinking once or twice a week.”
“Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.”
“The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.”
“Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away.”
“When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. I didn't want to be a failure, so I did ten times more work.”
“The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.”
“The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.”
“As long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.”
“The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.”
“Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.”
“Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.”
“The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.”
“If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.”
“The Jews generally give value. They make you pay; but they deliver the goods. In my experience the men who want something for nothing are invariably Christians.”
“I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.”
“Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.”