“The truth has never been of any real value to any human being – it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.”

We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.

Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.

Sooner or later; one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.

It is a great danger for everyone when what is shocking changes.

Destruction after all is a form of creation.

An autobiography is only ‘a sort of life’ – it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.

Friendship is something in the soul. It is a thing one feels. It is not a return for something.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in…We should be thankful we cannot see the horrors and degradations lying around our childhood, in cupboards and bookshelves, everywhere.

Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully.

Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.

Death will come in any case, and there is a long afterwards if the priests are right and nothing to fear if they are wrong.

Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil – or else an absolute ignorance.

A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

I hate you, God. I hate you as though you actually exist.

Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

I am unbearably human.

Hair loss is God’s way of telling me I’m human.

Balding if God’s way of showing you are only human… He takes the hair off your head and puts it in your ears.

Human action is governed largely by instinct and emotion.

Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph.

In the book of life every page has two sides: we human beings fill the upper side with our plans, hopes and wishes, but providence writes on the other side, and what it ordains is seldom our goal.

The cynic puts all human actions into two classes – openly bad and secretly bad.

The origin of a modern party is anthropological: humans meet and share food to lower hostility between them and indicate friendship.