“The most important thing in the world is to hold your soul aloft.”

We must laugh and cry, enjoy and suffer, in a word, vibrate to our full capacity … I think that’s what being really human means.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Read in order to live.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.

What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

Talent is nothing but long patience.

Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.

The principal thing in this world is to keep one’s soul aloft.

I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon removing it.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.

The words that we use I think are symbolic of the values that we hold.

It’s a burden trying to keep a secret. It’s hard. It probably takes more out of you trying to hold it and keep it than it does for you to really let it out.

I have held and hold souls to be immortal…. Speaking as a Catholic, they do not pass from body to body, but go to paradise, purgatory or hell.

Success sometimes may be defined as a disaster put on hold. Qualified. Has to be.

If I hold her hand she says, ‘Don’t touch!’ If I hold her foot she says ‘Don’t touch!’ But when I hold her waist-beads she pretends not to know.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

Such fluctuations were the natural element of the speculator, and he came early, buying in quantities and holding in storage tanks for higher prices.

The world doesn’t need more people playing small. It’s time to stop hiding out and start stepping out. It’s time to stop needing and start leading. It’s time to start sharing your gifts instead of hoarding them or pretending they don’t exist. It’s time you started playing the game of life in a “big” way.