“People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations.”

In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.

Hate is a lack of imagination.

Her face looked ugly in the attempt to avoid tears; it was an ugliness which bound him to her more than any beauty could have done. It isn’t being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love–it’s being unhappy together.

Would the world be in the mess it is if we were loyal to love and not to countries?

We forget very easily what gives us pain.

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.

The next best thing to talking to her is talking about her.

For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt.

I can’t talk you in terms of time –your time and my time are different

I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue; one can’t love and do nothing.

We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us.

To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honor – the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two.

I aim to be content with what I produce. It’s an aim I never achieve, but I go over my work word by word, time and again, so as to be as little dissatisfied as possible.

Innocence is a kind of insanity.

There is almost nothing you can say that holds up as a generalization, because it depends on too many factors: size, modulation, the rest of the field, a certain consistency that color has with forms, and the statement you’re trying to make.

In general, generalization is to lie, to tell lies.

Given a thimbleful of [dramatic] facts we rush to make generalizations as large as a tub.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

The true enemy of man is generalization.