“The secret to life is meaningless unless you discover it yourself.”

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.

A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute.

The crown of literature is poetry. It is its end and aim. It is the sublimest activity of the human mind. It is the achievement of beauty and delicacy. The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it.

People ask for criticism, but they only want praise.

The future will one day be the present and will seem as unimportant as the present does now.

I want a girl because I want to bring her up so that she shan’t make the mistakes I’ve made.

I wish I could make you see how exciting the life of the spirit is and how rich in experience. It’s illimitable. It’s such a happy life. There’s only one thing like it, when you’re up in a plane by yourself, high, high, and only infinity surrounds you.

The trouble is that thinking looks like loafing. Who wants to pay people for daydreaming?

If you don’t change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?

The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.

It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved.

You’re intoxicated by the boundless space.

All the words I use in my stories can be found in the dictionary-it’s just a matter of arranging them into the right sentences.

The tragedy of love is not death or separation. How long do you think it would have been before one or other of them ceased to care?

Intuition is critical in virtually everything you do. But, without relentless preparation and execution, it is meaningless.

The phrase ‘off with the crack of the bat’, while romantic, is really meaningless, since the outfielder should be in motion long before he hears the sound of the ball meeting the bat.

Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.

Fine, large, meaningless, general terms like romance and business can always be related. They take the place of thinking, and are highly useful to optimists and lecturers.

Loyalty is meaningless; it depends on what one is loyal to.

There was no reason to call or write letters. As it would have been meaningless, if we couldn’t hold each other tight.

Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.

Earth’s dispossessed are vulnerable targets for extremists: those who teach that global justice is meaningless; that satisfaction can come only in violence, division, and intellectual isolation.