“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”

Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

I like men who have a future and women who have a past.

The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.

Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Some things are more precious because they don’t last long.

I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Indeed I have always been of the opinion that hard work is simply the refuge of people who have nothing to do.

I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.

Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.

There’s only one way to make a beginning, and that is to begin; and begin with hard work, and patience, prepared for all the dissapoint­ments.

Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

It has been the political career of this man to begin with hypocrisy, proceed with arrogance, and finish with contempt.

Crisis is the path to happiness. Decay and disintegration do not spell doom, but ascent and beginning. The powerful forces of a new creation operate in the hush beyond the noise of the day.

When asked for advice by beginners. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.

If the German people lay down their arms the whole of Eastern and Southern Europe, together with the Reich, will come under Russian occupation. Behind an iron curtain mass butcheries of people would begin.

Every storm started with just a little drizzling.

I thought I’d begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.