“The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.”

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.

Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace.

Will power is only the tensile strength of one’s own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.

The only joy in the world is to begin. It is good to be alive because living is beginning, always, every moment.

To know the world, one must construct it.

Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one’s own pleasure is shared.

We can all do good deeds, but very few of us can think good thoughts.

If it is true that one gets used to suffering, how is it that as the years go one always suffers more? No, they are not mad, those people who amuse themselves, enjoy life, travel, make love, fight they are not mad. We should like to do the same ourselves.

I spent the whole evening sitting before a mirror to keep myself company.

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 second you change the way you look at a situation, your stress levels drop.

Everybody sooner or later has to drop the luggage and the baggage of illusions.

I am the drop that contains the ocean.

The Sea Will be the Sea Whatever the drop’s philosophy.

Once you pass forty, a dime isn’t worth bending over to pick up if you drop one.

Once I was in a restaurant and I dropped my fork on the floor, and they gave me a new fork. So I pushed my girlfriend out of her chair.

Bella, can you drop the rock, please? Carefully. Don’t hurt yourself.

Sometimes you feel like a very small drop in this huge ocean.