“On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.”

One can acquire everything in solitude except character.

Nothing is so hideous as an obsolete fashion.

The difference breeds hatred.

There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.

What is really beautiful must always be true.

Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.

I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.

I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction,” said Mathilde. “It is the only thing which cannot be bought.

Beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness.

True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.

It is better to have a prosaic husband and to take a romantic lover.

The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.

The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.

The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

People are less self-conscious in the intimacy of family life and during the anxiety of a great sorrow. The dazzling varnish of an extreme politeness is then less in evidence, and the true qualities of the heart regain their proper proportions.

It’s hard to see someone with a ‘perfect’ body and be like, ‘Why can’t I be like her?’ But that person was born to be who she is, and you’re born to be who you are.

I really want people to know that I’ve worked hard, very hard, to get to where I am today.. this didn’t just happen overnight.

Don’t give up! Be friends with people who help you work hard.

I myself hate that old Hemingwayesque paradigm of the writer as prizefighter and I have tried hard to create an alternate one for myself.

Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.

Racism is taught in the home. We agree on that? Well, it’s very hard to teach racism to a teenager who’s listening to rap music and who idolizes, say, Snoop Dogg. It’s hard to say, ‘That guy is less than you.’ The kid is like, ‘I like that guy, he’s cool. How is he less than me?

It’s also stamina in your direction, stamina in your interests. If you are working on different things but all of them very hard, you’re not really going to get anywhere. You’ll never become an expert.

That the machine of Heaven is not a hard and impervious body full of various real spheres, as up to now has been believed by most people.