People don't get to choose their family, but if you have the family you would choose - that's happiness.

Our ancestors derived less from life than we do, but they also expected much less and were less intent on controlling the future. We are of the arrogant generations who believe a lasting happiness was promised to us at birth. Promised? By whom?

That same moment he ordered the hateful portrait taken out. But that did not calm his inner agitation: all his feelings and all his being were shaken to their depths, and he came to know that terrible torment which, by way of a striking exception, sometimes occurs in nature, when a weak talent strains to show itself on too grand a scale and fails; that torment which gives birth to great things in a youth, but, in passing beyond the border of dream, turns into a fruitless yearning; that dreadful torment which makes a man capable of terrible evildoing.

Misguided good men are more dangerous than honest bad men. It is because they are seen as good that, in and by good conscience, the mob will always, stubbornly back them without question.

I knew that I was talented. I was positive about that. I wasn__ sure exactly what I was talented at, but I was ambitious enough to wait it out and see what turned up.

Put off this sloth,' the master said, 'for shame!Sitting on feather-pillows, lying reclined Beneath the blanket is no way to fame -Fame, without which man's life wastes out of mind, Leaving on earth no more memorialThan foam in water or smoke upon the wind