“Another occupation might have been better.”

The one self- knowledge worth having is to know one’s own mind.

Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.

The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once.

An aphorism is true where it has fixed the impression of a genuine experience.

The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.

Religion is rather the attempt to express the complete reality of goodness through every aspect of our being.

My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside… the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

Up to a certain point every man is what he thinks he is.

True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.

The Self has turned out to mean so many things, to mean them so ambiguously, and to be so wavering in its application, that we do not feel encouraged.

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart’s blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.

There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.

I can myself conceive of nothing else than the experienced.

It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.

The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.

I, talking about my children, of course I wanted them to succeed in life, they have to choose whatever job or occupation that they want, I will not try to influence.

Mr. President, prime ministers, let us have ambitions: ambitions to move beyond the violence and occupation, to the day when two states, Palestine and Israel, can live together side by side in peace and security.

He realised, more vividly than ever before, that art had two constant, two unending preoccupations: it is always meditating upon death and it is always thereby creating life.

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.

My father was a fish market porter. So I grew up on fish, because he used to steal one a day, I grew up on the very best fish that money could buy, ’cause he only stole the good stuff.

Can you find a man who loves the occupation that provides him with a livelihood? Professions are like marriages; we end by feeling only their inconveniences.

My dad worked in a very typical first-generation immigrant fashion – 24 hours a day for years.