“Any man who talks about his love affairs thereby proves he is ignorant of love and is moved only by vanity.”

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.

I have a bad memory for facts.

Far less envy in America than in France.

Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are only our eyes looking in.

People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.

After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.

The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world

Attention is something I’ve learned to ignore. This is what I do: I live my life and they document it.

You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.

Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.

Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road.

Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back towards disease and death.

Envy is ignorance, Imitation is Suicide.

I say there is no darkness but ignorance.

Every day I wake up determined to deliver a better life for the people all across America that have been ignored, neglected and abandoned.