“The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years.”

A man who is half an idiot, but who keeps a sharp lookout and acts prudently all his life, often enjoys the pleasure of triumphing over men of more imagination than he.

I used to think of deathlike I suppose soldiers think of it: it was a possible thing that I could well avoid by my skill.

A forty-year-old woman is only something to men who have loved her in her youth.

The boredom of married life inevitable destroys love, when love has preceded marriage.

When a man leaves his mistress, he runs the risk of being betrayed two or three times daily.

The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

I have a bad memory for facts.

Far less envy in America than in France.

Love is a well from which we can drink only as much as we have put in, and the stars that shine from it are only our eyes looking in.

People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.

After moral poisoning, one requires physical remedies and a bottle of champagne.

The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world

Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

Borders are man-made they divide us physically don’t let them make us turn on each other – we are not enemies.

Even though we were both under the same roof of that coffee shop. I was still solar systems away from you.

My tongue is sour from the hunger of missing you.

In maintaining distance from your thought and emotion, you can become available to the grace of the greatest beings.

You drifted away and I stood there wondering, would the sea ever return you back to me, or was our love lost forever.

Two souls can’t love when one is always being distant.

A year ago we battled atoms to see each other – spaced apart but still so close together in heart.

And every breath without you is torture, but at least I can finally breathe again.