“In business, sir, one has no friends, only correspondents.”

So he went down, smiling sceptically and mutter the final word in human wisdom: ‘Perhaps!

How did I escape? With difficulty. How did I plan this moment? With pleasure!

Besides we are men, and after all it is our business to risk our lives.

No, I slept as I always do when I am bored and have not the courage to amuse myself, or when I am hungry and have not the desire to eat.

Love is the most selfish of all the passions.

Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.

It is almost as difficult to keep a first class person in a fourth class job, as it is to keep a fourth class person in a first class job.

Order is the key to all problems.

Be kind. Aim for my heart.

In politics, my dear fellow, you know, as well as I do, there are no men, but ideas – no feelings, but interests; in politics we do not kill a man, we only remove an obstacle, that is all.

He’s right: They have to put madmen with madmen.

Never fear quarrels, but seek hazardous adventures.

Hatred is blind; rage carries you away; and he who pours out vengeance runs the risk of tasting a bitter draught.

A person who doubts himself is like a man who would enlist in the ranks of his enemies and bear arms against himself.

What a fool I was, not to tear my heart out on the day when I resolved to revenge myself!

We must never expect discretion in first love: it is accompanied by such excessive joy that unless the joy is allowed to overflow, it will choke you.

It is the greatest mistake to think that man is always one and the same. A man is never the same for long. He is continually changing. He seldom remains the same even for half an hour.

The only type of sexual relations possible are those with someone who is as advanced and capable as oneself.

Begin with the possible; begin with one step.

You are not a dead thing. Stop acting like one.

Each one’s destiny cannot be altered.

The best way to educate oneself is to become part of the revolution.

That’s the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.

The human face is as strange to me as a countenance, which, the more one looks at it, the more it closes itself off and escapes by the steps of unknown stairways.