“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.

If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.

With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?

I have nothing to declare except my genius.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

To define is to limit.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.

People never learn anything by being told, they have to find out for themselves.

When people tell me they’ve learned from experience, I tell them the trick is to learn from other people’s experience.

Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this.

Success in life is the result of good judgment. Good judgment is usually the result of experience. Experience is usually the result of bad judgment.

You can’t create experience, you undergo it.

Innovation is usually the result of connections of past experiences.

Positive thoughts generate positive feelings and attract positive life experiences.

The experience of every age and nation has proved it and we must in a great measure.