“Every time government attempts to handle our affairs, it costs more and the results are worse than if we had handled them ourselves.”

Art for art’s sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. (1804)

The great question in life is the suffering we cause, and the most ingenious metaphysics do not justify the man who has broken the heart that loved him.

There are things one does not say for a long time, but, once they are said, one never stops repeating them.

No duty, however, binds us to these so-called laws, whose corrupting influence menaces what is noblest in our being.

There is a bizarre notion according to which it is claimed that because men are corrupt, it is necessary to give certain of them all the more power… on the contrary, they must be given less power.

Nearly always, so as to live at peace with ourselves, we disguise our own impotence and weakness as calculation and policy; it is our way of placating that half of our being which is in a sense a spectator of the other.

I’ve had some wonderful love affairs and some that didn’t work out. I don’t want to dwell on that and I don’t want to put people down, but I think all the fabulous places I’ve been, the wonderful things that have happened for me, the great people I’ve met – that ought to make a story.

[Cultural department] understand nothing but bureaucratic daily affairs. They don’t care about culture.

Happiness is never a negative affair; it is to be won by men who are fully alive, full of the joy of living.

In the UK cycling was very popular until the end of the 1950’s but it really lost out to our love affair with the car.

Iran began a policy of expanding its revolution, of interfering with the affairs of its neighbors

Too many expedients may spoil an affair.

To separate man and woman at school, at work, at meetings, in short, to separate them at life, is the affair of perverted and fusty minds! Where there is separation, there is excessive primitiveness!

Religion has become an impersonal affair, an institutional loyalty. It survives on the level of activities rather than in the stillness of commitment.