“Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.”

Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery.

History is just new people making old mistakes.

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

A woman should soften but not weaken a man.

The madman is a dreamer awake.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

Human beings are funny. They long to be with the person they love but refuse to admit openly.

Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate.

There is little that gives children greater pleasure than when a grown-up lets himself down to their level, renounces his oppressive superiority and plays with them as an equal.

All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it.

The creative writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously.

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations.

If it’s not one thing, it’s your mother.

A strong egoism is a protection.

The meager satisfaction that man can extract from reality leaves him starving.

If you drink much from a bottle marked ‘poison’ it is certain to disagree with you sooner or later.

Always drink upstream from the herd.

We should look for someone to eat and drink with before looking for something to eat and drink…

To eat and drink without a friend is to devour like the lion and the wolf.

Don’t drink at all, don’t smoke, you must exercise and eat vegetables and fruit.

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same.

That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.

I don’t even drink! I can’t stand the taste of alcohol. Every New Year’s Eve I try one drink and every time it makes me feel sick.