“Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.”

One of the evils of money is that it tempts us to look at it rather than at the things that it buys.

My temple stands not upon Mount Moriah but in the Elysian Field where even the immoral are admitted. My motto is ‘Lord, I disbelieve – help thou my unbelief.

You confuse what’s important with what’s impressive.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world.

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand.

Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend.

One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

If we act the truth the people who really love us are sure to come back to us in the long run

For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.

Life is sometimes life and sometimes only a drama, and one must learn to distinguish t’other from which . . .

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talks that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence.

Science is better than sympathy, if only it is science.

It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.

Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

International affairs is very much run like the mafia.

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

Stupid is a great force in human affairs.

One can find women who have never had one love affair, but it is rare indeed to find any who have had only one.

We must develop huge demonstrations, because the world is used to big dramatic affairs. They think in terms of hundreds of thousands and millions and billions…

A person should be free to do as he likes in his own concerns; but he ought not to be free to do as he likes in acting for another, under the pretext that the affairs of the other are his own affairs.

All love affairs end. Eventually the girl is gonna put curlers in her hair.