Meryl Streep

What makes you different or weird. That’s your strength.

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea, to discover a great thought – an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plough had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightning carry your messages. To be the first – that is the idea.

An index is a great leveller.

Without a measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed.

The majority have no other reason for their opinions than that they are the fashion.

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All action is of infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being inflated with celestial air, until it eclipses the sun and moon.

Power doesn’t corrupt people; people corrupt power.

Death is the king of this world: ‘Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it come to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was.

Do what you feel in your heart to be right – for you’ll be criticized anyway.

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.

She has taken a patronizing fancy to her father, the Admiral, who accepts her condescension gratefully as age brings more and more home to him the futility of his social position.

How earthy old people become moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.