“You don’t remember days, you remember moments.”

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.

From someone who doesn’t want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette.

We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.

Don’t mix wine and women.

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

All our “most sacred affections ” are merely prosaic habit.

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one’s own loneliness, how to communicate with others.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else’s.

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.

The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess.

No guest is so welcome in a friend’s house that he will not become a nuisance after three days.

Dissolving the dross which had ‘encrusted’ Christianity ‘in the days of ignorance and superstition’.

I was speaking to Ridley Scott the other day and he makes a film every 18 months. He’s amazing really.

I want to be consistent from the first day of the season to the last.

Never do but one thing at a time, and never put off till to-morrow what you can do today.

Joy is like restless day; but peace divine like quiet night.

Do not underestimate the power of an enemy, no matter how great or small, to rise against you another day.

No matter at how distant a day, somehow, in some shape, probably the least I would have devised, it came.