“Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.”

Writing is a fine thing, because it combines the two pleasures of talking to yourself and talking to a crowd.

You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering .

A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man – the one he used to be.

What is to come will emerge only after long suffering, long silence.

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.

What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it.

Those that were up themselves, kept others low; Those that were low themselves, held others hard; He suffered them to ryse or greater grow; But every one did strive his fellow down to throw.

I think that the formation of [DNA’s] structure by Watson and Crick may turn out to be the greatest developments in the field of molecular genetics in recent years.

The superiority of some men is merely local. They are great because their associates are little.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

My great forte in killing buffaloes was to get them circling by riding my horse at the head of the herd and shooting their leaders. Thus the brutes behind were crowded to the left, so that they were soon going round and round.

The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may going to prove one’s self a fool.