You might not always get what you want, but you always get what you expect.

when the ambitious man whose slogan is "Either Caesar or nothing" does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it. But this also means something else: precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he now cannot bear to be himself.

The hallmark of the fraudulent is that it becomes what you would like it to be.

A heaven you created by yourself will never be heaven for long.

All promise outruns performance.

Ninety percent of the time things turn out worse than you thought they would. The other ten percent of the time you had no right to expect that much.

Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.

The problems in life come when we're sowing one thing and expecting to reap something entirely different.

Our friends are generally ready to do everything for us, except the very thing we wish them to do.

we generally find pleasure to be not nearly so pleasant as we expected, and pain very much more painful.

Marrying means doing whatever possible to become repulsed of each other

My dear, you will be woefully disappointed if in my story you expect any thing like a novel. I once heard a general say, that nothing was less like a review than a battle; and I can tell you that nothing is more unlike a novel than real life. Of all lives, mine has been the least romantic.