“But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most… he saw fireflies where there were none.”

The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.

If you’re going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones. After all, there are better ways to starve to death.

When I wake up,” he said, “remind me that I’m going to marry her.

But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.

But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.

All my life, I’ve been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.

Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.

An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.

One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.

Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.

The heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good.

Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.

Love does not die, when someone gets old, people get old, because they can not love anymore.

They enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like children and playing together like dogs.

Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.

Become a better person and be sure to know who you are, before meeting someone new and hoping that person knows who you are.

It is strange that the years teach us patience; that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.

Fear narrows the little entrance of our heart. It shrinks up our capacity to love. It freezes up our power to give ourselves.

One thing I teach my children and want everyone to know that even if you happen to be on a pedestal you should have the capacity to turn around and say, ‘I don’t know’. We are scared to go wrong. Downfall is part of life.

Meditation can help us embrace our worries, our fear, our anger; and that is very healing. We let our own natural capacity of healing do the work.

People are losing the capacity to listen to words or follow ideas.

Encouragement is awesome. Think about it. It has the capacity to lift a man’s or a woman’s shoulders. To breathe fresh air into the fading embers of a smoldering dream. To actually change the course of another human being’s day, week, or life.

The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves. The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor’s shortcomings as he is of his own.

People are just not impressed by me at home.