“A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.”

Just as those who practice the same profession recognize each other instinctively, so do those who practice the same vice.

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

We think and name in one world, we live and feel in another.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation.

The bonds that unite us to another human being are sanctified when he or she adopts the same point of view as ourselves in judging one of our imperfections.

We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body.

An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.

In love, happiness is an abnormal state.

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world, our own, we see it multiplied and as many original artists as there are, so many worlds are at our disposal.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy.

Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life.

To us a single act of injustice–cheating in business, exploitation of the poor–is slight; to the prophets, a disaster.

But to get your pleasure from not taking, from cheating yourself deliberately like my brother did today, from not getting, from not taking.

Indeed, the sort of crimes and even the amount of delinquency that fill the prophets of Israel with dismay do not go beyond that which we regard as normal, as typical ingredients of social dynamics.

Hope! fortune’s cheating lottery; when for one prize an hundred blanks there be!

When I consider life, it is all a cheat. Yet fooled with hope, people favor this deceit.

A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth.

There is no rampart that will hold out against malice.

There’s just enough drinking and cheating songs around without me adding to them. Unless you’ve got something better than “Misery and Gin” by Merle Haggard, you’re beating a dead horse.