“It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it.”

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. The fearful thing about it is that, not knowing what truth may be, we can still recognize lies.

A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself.

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men’s pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny.

We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God.

It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.

When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.

Here’s the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming… suddenly you find – at the age of 50, say – that a whole new life has opened before you.

I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.

Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.

I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of ‘thinking’ and ‘enjoying’ what they call ‘living’, I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds.

A holiday isn’t a holiday, without plenty of freedom and fun.

Don’t drink to get drunk. Drink to enjoy life.

Nothing provokes speculation more than the sight of a woman enjoying herself.

Enjoyment inflames love in some men, and extinguishes it in others: the wind that assists large vessels, upsets small ones.