“A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.”

We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.

I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.

One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I’ve had.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.

Everything is politics.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected–in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.

The world, dear Agnes, is a strange affair.

Men have always looked before and after, and rebelled against the existing order. But for their divine discontent, men would not have been men, and there would have been no progress in human affairs.

Gold gives to the ugliest thing a certain charming air, For that without it were else a miserable affair.

The mind and spirit of man advance when he is tried by suffering. … so suffering and tribulation free man from the petty affairs of this worldly life until he arrives at a state of complete detachment.

Today the mass of the people are uninformed even as to ordinary affairs, how much less do they grasp the core of the important problems and complex needs of the time.

It is more important to know where you are going than to get there quickly. Do not mistake activity for achievement. Remember that there is nothing stable in human affairs, therefore avoid undue elation in prosperity or undue depression in adversity.

When the shoe fits, the foot is forgotten. When the belt fits, the belly is forgotten. When the heart is right, “for” and “against” are forgotten. No drives, no compulsions, no needs, no attractions: Then your affairs are under control. You are a free man.

I am of certain convinced that the greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.