Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'. We their sons are more worthless than they: so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.
One doesn't stay in a state of nirvana by hiding from difficulties. You stay in nirvana by lavishing nirvana on everyone you meet, by giving it away as fast as you receive it.
Society, magazines, posters, music videos, investment bankers. A lot of times, in my past anyway, looking within wasn't overly encouraged. Pretty much everybody proclaimed that fame would give me power and fortune.
If you should ask me what are the ways of God, I would tell you that the first is humility, the second is humility, and the third is humility. Not that there are no other precepts to give, but if humility does not preceed all that we do, our efforts are fruitless.
Every one on this earth should believe, amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament have some object on the earth. Every one on the earth should believe that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be given.
He that gives good advice, builds with one hand; he that gives good counsel and example, builds with both; but he that gives good admonition and bad example, builds with one hand and pulls down with the other.
In the book, D'Artagnan doesn't actually become an official Musketeer until quite near the end, and we make quite a big thing about that. I won't give too much away, but when he finally does make it, they're not going to make it easy for him. That never changes.
I am come, young ladies, in a very moralizing strain, to observe that our pleasures of this world are always to be for, and that we often purchase them at a great disadvantage, giving readi-monied actual happiness for a draft on the future, that may not be honoured.
I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference; it can never give me a pang. There are subtleties which I cannot master at all - they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me - and this adverb plague is one of them.