Writing calls on unused muscles and involves solitude and immobility.
Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.
A man often imagines that he acts, when he is acted upon.
If we took as much pains to be what we ought, as we do to deceive others by disguising what we are; we might appear as we are, without being at the trouble of any disguise.
To be a great man it is necessary to know how to profit by the whole of our good fortune.
Jealousy is in some measure just and reasonable, since it merely aims at keeping something that belongs to us or we think belongsto us, whereas envy is a frenzy that cannot bear anything that belongs to others.
High fortune makes both our virtues and vices stand out as objects that are brought clearly to view by the light.
The urge to write one's autobiography, so I have been told, overtakes everyone sooner or later.
There are some occasions in which a man must tell half his secret, in order to conceal the rest; but there is seldom one in which a man should tell all. Great skill is necessary to know how far to go, and where to stop.
There are no guarantees in life. The simple twists of fate and the breaks of the game are the two maxims that define so much of the success and failure in life.
Anyone from abroad will tell you that it is the class system that really lies at the root of our problems, economic and industrial. The House of Lords symbolises that.