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

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.

If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life.

With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?

I have nothing to declare except my genius.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

To define is to limit.

Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends.

There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

To lose one parent, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.

All begins with you surrounding yourself with the right people—the good and authentic people—and unsurrounding yourself with the wrong people. And we both know there are plenty of wrong people in this world.

For that which is without a beginning, a final cause need not be sought.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

And so began one of the most exciting periods of my life, the time of discovery.

We began to talk about one’s faith and the storm.

Political promises are much like marriage vows. They are made at the beginning of the relationship between candidate and voter, but are quickly forgotten.

If you do different, you will have different. If you begin to require more of yourself, that in and of itself is different.