“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.”

The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.

Life is so largely controlled by chance that its conduct can be but a perpetual improvisation.

The most valuable thing I have learned from life is to regret nothing.

As the cosmos are in place, so be it with your life.

We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.

I wish I could make you see how much fuller the life I offer you is than anything you have a conception of.

For my part I cannot believe in a God who is angry with me because I do not believe in him. I cannot believe in a God who is less tolerant than I. I cannot believe in a God who has neither humour nor common sense.

Don’t wait for experience to come to you; go out after experience. Experience is your material.

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

Life isn’t long enough for love and art.

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

I always find it more difficult to say the things I mean than the things I don’t.

You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they?

Love is what happens to men and women who don’t know each other.

When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably.

You’re entering dangerous land when you start theorising about comedy.

For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it.

It is better to meet danger than to wait for it.

When a woman forsakes her vulnerability because she’s been hurt or because she lives in a dangerous world or doesn’t want to be used, she loses something essential about being a woman.

Security is not found in the absence of danger, but in the presence of Jesus.

Adventure, with all its requisite danger and wildness, is a deeply spiritual longing written into the soul of man.

The most dangerous man on earth is the man who has reckoned with his own death. All men die; few men ever really live.

I think what’s dangerous [about comedy] is that you’re coming into the room announcing your intentions.