“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!”

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.

A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.

What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Talent is nothing but long patience.

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.

The principal thing in this world is to keep one’s soul aloft.

I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

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.

Overall I enjoy a certain anonymity. I live a very normal, very ordinary life.

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.

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.

The beauty of a quiet mind is that ordinary life becomes extraordinary. There is no need to wait for these moments, or create this moments, they are already and always here. These simple moments can become your natural life, your extraordinary ordinary life.

The day is not far off when one ordinary carrot may be pregnant with revolution.

I’ve definitely accepted the fact that I’m not normal.

The best of you is galaxies away from the ordinary.