“The greatest difficulty of Travel is that one is forced to take oneself along.”

The most attractive are not those who allow us to kiss them at once [we soon feel ungrateful] or those who never allow us to kiss them [we soon forget them], but those who coyly lead us between the two extremes.

There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers… Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness.

There is a longing for a return to a time without the need for choices, free of the regret at the inevitable loss that all choice (however wonderful) has entailed.

We are presented with an unpleasant choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle or just charming rituals for which we struggle to find equivalents in secular society.

Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system-the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side-they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-consciou s, and cynical world.

Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.

We should read other people’s books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer’s thought that help us to do so.

Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.

The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.

One of the better guarantors of ending up in a good relationship: an advanced capacity to be alone.

I am in general a very pessimistic person with an optimistic, day to day take on things. The bare facts of life are utterly terrifying. And yet, one can laugh. Indeed, one has to laugh precisely because of the darkness: the nervous laughter of the trenches.

Every realistic picture represents a choice as to which features of reality should be given prominence; no painting ever captures the whole.

The blunt large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones.

Happiness is impossible for longer than 15 minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.

Our prayers run along one road and God’s answers by another, and by and by they meet.

I feel that I’d rather know an actors’ work, or have an instinct about them and sit down and have coffee with them, or I’ll see them in something and I’ll see if I can get along with them in some way, shape, or form.

Help along one another’s projects and plans.

The many of us who attain what we may and forget those who help us along the line we’ve got to remember that there are so many others to pull along the way. The farther they go, the further we all go.

No matter what anyone says, no matter the excuse or explanation, whatever a person does in the end is what he intended to do all along.

If you have a surreal life like I do, you’ve got to have fun along the way.

Get thee behind me Satan, and push me along. I’m kin to the devil.

Remain calm, serene, always in command of yourself. You will then find out how easy it is to get along.