“If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.”

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men’s pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny.

We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God.

It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.

When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.

Here’s the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace.

Will power is only the tensile strength of one’s own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.

I am enjoying my face changing, as well as realizing that at the same time, as you get older, the machine isn’t as well-oiled as it was.

I think every person should be able to enjoy life. Try to decide what you most enjoy doing, and then look around to see if there is a job for which you could prepare yourself that would enable you to continue having this sort of joy.

I had to learn how to function as a human being. And I really enjoyed that process.

Anything can go wrong, but you can’t think about it all the time. You have to enjoy every moment.

Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.

I feel thankful to God, first and foremost, allowing me to enjoy this ‘smell the roses’ kind of thing.

If I was dead, I wouldn’t know I was dead. That’s the only thing I have against death. I want to enjoy my death.

I’m never tired of going to the studio. I enjoy recording and documenting everything and trying new things.