“For the happy man prayer is only a jumble of words, until the day when sorrow comes to explain to him the sublime language by means of which he speaks to God.”

We are never quits with those who oblige us,” was Dantes’ reply; “for when we do not owe them money, we owe them gratitude.

I am a count, not a saint.

Know you not that you are my sun by day, and my star by night? By my faith! I was in deepest darkness till you appeared and illuminated all.

We are always in a hurry to be happy; for when we have suffered a long time, we have great difficulty in believing in good fortune.

On what slender threads do life and fortune hang.

I am strong against everything, except against the death of those I love. He who dies gains; he who sees others die loses.

Joy to hearts which have suffered long is like the dew on the ground after a long drought; both the heart and the ground absorb that beneficent moisture falling on them, and nothing is outwardly apparant.

The tree forsakes not the flower: the flower falls from the tree.

There is no friendship that cares about an overheard secret.

As a general rule…people ask for advice only in order not to follow it; or if they do follow it, in order to have someone to blame for giving it.

When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever.

A weakened mind always sees everything through a black veil. The soul makes its own horizons; your soul is dark, which is why you see such a cloudy sky.

I do not often laugh, sir, as you may perceive by the air of my countenance; but nevertheless, I retain the privilege of laughing when I please.

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

Business? It’s quite simple; it’s other people’s money.

I do not cling to life sufficiently to fear death.

I analyse in my own way, in very simple, no-jargon language. If somebody is talking in very complicated way, I never like that.

I think the first little jolt I got was reading Gerard Manley Hopkins – I liked other poems… but Hopkins was kind of electric for me – he changed the rules with speech, and the whole intensity of the language was there and so on.

My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension. But then there’s the reality: there’s no Heaven, no afterlife of the sort we were promised, and no personal God.

The dialect part of it comes into play, but nothing like the differentiation that language sets up, for example.

Music goes way back before language does. And music is like the key to a whole spiritual existence which this society doesn’t even talk about. We know it’s there.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Music is a universal language insofar as you don’t need to know anything else about a musician that you are playing with other than that they can play music.