“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.”

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.

Everyone lives by selling something.

I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.

Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.

Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?

The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.

You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else.

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.

It costs nothing in money, it is all profit, it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.

You can kill the body but not the spirit.

Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

Marriage is like life – it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.

Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.

When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward.

I don’t think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we’re concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.

No matter who you are, black, white, green, there’s going to be things in your way, you know what I mean?

You can’t allow the forces of political correction to shut you up. I mean, why are people afraid to say, ‘Merry Christmas?’ Give me a break. If people don’t like it, yeah, they can go do something else.

What anxiety means is it’s as though the world is knocking at your door, and you need to create, you need to make something, you need to do something. I think anxiety, for people who have found their own heart and their own souls, for them it is a stimulus toward creativity, toward courage. It’s what makes us human beings.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

Belief in oneself and knowing who you are, I mean, that’s the foundation for everything great.

Science appears to us with a very different aspect after we have found out that it is not in lecture rooms only, and by means of the electric light projected on a screen, that we may witness physical phenomena.

Magicians can do more by means of faith than physicians by the truth.