“The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.”

Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.

What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

Exuberance is better than taste.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.

One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

A friend who dies, it’s something of you who dies.

The future is the worst thing about the present.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Read in order to live.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

The community of economic life is the major feature within a nation, and it is the economy which holds together the people living in a territory. It is on this basis that the new Africans recognise themselves as potentially one nation, whose dominion is the entire African continent.

Mrs. Tiggy-winkle’s hand, holding the tea-cup, was very very brown, and very very wrinkly with the soap-suds; and all through her gown and her cap, there were HAIRPINS sticking wrong end out; so that Lucie didn’t like to sit too near her.

Maintains its hold with such unfailing sway, We feel it e’en in age, and at our latest day.

It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.

I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.

With a firm and steadfast mind one should hold under all conditions, that everywhere the earth is below and the sky above and to the energetic man, every region is his fatherland.

A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom- he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.

He tasted deeper, holding himself over me, and suddenly he was everywhere; his knee trapping my leg, his lips grazing warm, rough, sensuous. He splayed his hand at the small of my back, holding me tightly, driving me to sink my fingers deeper into him, clinging to him as if letting go would mean losing part of myself.