“No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.”

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.

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.

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.

Be independent of the good opinion of other people.

I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the power is a value.

Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty?

Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.

I think of Westernized culture as a good visual for my music.

I think what I’ve come to now is, that fear is good; it’s what life is about. You need to be afraid because fear gives you the strength to carry on important tasks.

Put out the good and keep the bad – don’t believe all you read in the Bible.

Each misfortune you encounter will carry in it the seed of tomorrow’s good luck.