“Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.”

If you don’t love me, it does not matter, anyway I can love for both of us.

Politics in the middle of things of the imagination is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert.

Almost all our misfortunes in life come from the wrong notions we have about the things that happen to us.

But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.

People happy in love have an air of intensity.

This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.

Who knows whether it is not true that phosphorus and mind are not the same thing?

Great ladies are no more spiteful than the average rich woman; but one acquires in their society a greater susceptibility, and feels more profoundly andmore irremediably, their unpleasant remarks.

I love her beauty, but I fear her mind.

Our true passions are selfish.

A man who is half an idiot, but who keeps a sharp lookout and acts prudently all his life, often enjoys the pleasure of triumphing over men of more imagination than he.

I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.

A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.

The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage.

When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.

The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

Be mindful of the words that you use and the actions that you live and who you are and how it is you use your power. Keep clear at all times that you are what you say you are.

I’m not really a first-move kind of gal.

There are eternal consequences resulting from all our thoughts, words and actions, of which we take far too little account.

Your biography becomes your biology. This biography includes the totality of your choices, the things you feed your body – you thoughts, your actions, your food – the thing you feed your life.

You can’t read about push ups. You gotta do them.

An intention is a quality of consciousness that you bring to an action.

What I ought to do and what I feel like doing are seldom the same thing.

Everyone is saying that I’m retiring, but I want to solemnly declare, that I don’t want to retire, I just want to do things a bit less dangerous to my body, less dangerous action.