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

The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We’ll speak to the night as it’s whispering softly.

The only joy in the world is to begin.

Suicides are timid murderers. Masochism instead of Sadism.

All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.

From someone who doesn’t want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette.

We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.

Don’t mix wine and women.

You don’t remember days, you remember moments.

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

All our “most sacred affections ” are merely prosaic habit.

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one’s own loneliness, how to communicate with others.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else’s.

To endure is greater than to dare; to tire out hostile fortune; to be daunted my no difficulty; to keep heart when all have lost it; to go through intrigue spotless; to forgo even ambition when the end is gained – who can say this is not greatness?

I am not ambitious to appear a man of letters: I could be content the world should think I had scarce looked upon any other book than that of nature.

All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.

Few are more unhappy than those who have great ambition, but little energy to urge it into activity.

We now know most things that can be measured in this world, except the bounds of human ambition!

I don’t have any ambition.

I’ve got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.

Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already I am.