. . . the sun rose each morning to stare into my face with the blank but touching gaze of a lovely retarded child.
It takes nearly as much ability to know how to profit by good advice as to know how to act for one's self.
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.
The one religion is beyond all speech.
I don't feel any real animosity towards critics when they write negative things. I think some are more perceptive than others. Some are very knowledgeable about painting. But it isn't something I have any influence over, so there isn't any point in worrying about it.
If you don't learn from your mistakes, then they become regrets.
some journalists have described the South Pole as 'hell on earth. ' Others refer to my time here as 'an ordeal. ' They would be surprised to know how beautiful Antarctica has seemed to me, with its waves of ice in a hundred shades of blue and white, its black winter sky, its ecstatic wheel of stars. They would never understand how the lights of the Dome welcomed me from a distance, or how often I danced and sang and laughed here with my friends. And how I was not afraid.