“Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.”

When a man is in love, he doubts, very often, what he most firmly believes.

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can’t quite name.

The man that thinks he loves his mistress for her own sake is mightily mistaken.

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye.

We do not despise all those who have vices, but we do despise those that have no virtue.

Silence is the safest course for any man to adopt who distrust himself.

We confess our little faults to persuade people that we have no large ones.

Men give away nothing so liberally as their advice.

Conceit causes more conversation than wit.

Jealousy is bred in doubts. When those doubts change into certainties, then the passion either ceases or turns absolute madness.

Usually we praise only to be praised.

It is not in the power of even the most crafty dissimulation to conceal love long, where it really is, nor to counterfeit it long where it is not.

Few people have the wisdom to prefer the criticism that would do them good, to the praise that deceives them.

When a man must force himself to be faithful in his love, this is hardly better than unfaithfulness.

Confidence contributes more to conversation than wit.

I think it’s horrible that people have to be told. Don’t smoke! Everybody knows it’s bad for the health. But they have to forbid it.

Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.

We cannot learn to love other tourists,-the laws of nature forbid it,-but, meditating soberly on the impossibility of their loving us, we may reach some common platform of tolerance, some common exchange of recognition and amenity.

Muslims are not bloodthirsty people. Islam is a religion of peace that forbids the killing of the innocent. Islam also accepts the Prophets, whether those prophets are Mohammed