“A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.”

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.

We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.

I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.

One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I’ve had.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.

Everything is politics.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

If the affairs of the world were put in the hands of the screwball artists, it couldn’t be in a worse state than it is now !

It is ridiculous to suppose that the great head of things, whatever it be, pays any regard to human affairs.

Genius is mainly an affair of energy.

Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked.

It is frequently a misfortune to have very brilliant men in charge of affairs. They expect too much of ordinary men.

War isn’t declared in the name of God; it is a human affair entirely.

The ordinary literary man, even though he be an eminent historian, is ill-fitted to be a mentor in affairs of government. For… things are for the most part very simple in books, and in practical life very complex.

People are hurt in love affairs and never recover, more than a boxing match.