“In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.”

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.

Hate is a lack of imagination.

Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn’t being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love–it’s being unhappy together.

Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.

The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.

For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.

I can’t talk you in terms of time –your time and my time are different

I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can’t love and do nothing.

We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us.

To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honor – the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two.

I aim to be content with what I produce. It’s an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.

Innocence is a kind of insanity.

Most things disappoint till you look deeper.

Human nature is disposed to do good.

God made food; the devil the cooks.

There is no end to the power a man can obtain.

The king’s might is greater than human, and his arm is very long.

The power to question is the basis of all human progress.

I want to talk about the nature of human beings or how we’re evolving as a race.

But if you know that you are a man too, and that even such are those that rule, learn this first of all: that all human affairs are a wheel which, as it turns, does not allow the same men always to be fortunate.

I know that human happiness never remains long in the same place.