As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it's a bore.
Accident counts for as much in companionship as in marriage.
They know enough who know how to learn.
Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.
The proper study of mankind is woman.
No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
Unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Politics, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence -- beginning with one's own.
A friend in power is a friend lost.
Power is poison. It's effect on Presidents had always been tragic.
American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.
Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuse himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.
No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.