The man of action is not the headstrong fool who rushes into danger with no thought for himself, but the man who puts into practice the things he knows.
It is not the actual enjoyment of pleasure that we desire. What we want is to test the futility of that pleasure, so as to be no longer obsessed by it.
War makes men barbarous because, to take part in it, one must harden oneself against all regret, all appreciation of delicacy and sensitive values. One must live as if those values did not exist, and when the war is over one has lost the resilience to return to those values.
Are you or aren’t you convinced that weakness is a man’s condition? How can you raise yourself if you haven’t fallen first?
Don’t mix wine and women.
Those philosophers who believe in the absolute logic of truth have never had to discuss it on close terms with a woman.
For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.
You wait for nothing if not for the word that will burst from the deep like a fruit among branches.
You will hear words old and spent and useless like costumes left over from yesterday’s parties.
Work alone isn’t enough for me and mine; we know how to break our backs, but the great dream Of my fathers was to be good at doing nothing.
The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We’ll speak to the night as it’s whispering softly.
Don’t you know that what happens to you once always happens again? You always react in the same way to the same thing. It’s no accident when you make a mess. Then you do it again. It’s called destiny.
I am the captain of my destiny, I do not abandon the ship in hard times, But, I do have sense enough not to go down with the ship.
Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.
It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?
Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.
The great lovers will always be unhappy, because for them love is great and so they ask of their beloved the same intensity of thought that they have for her – otherwise they feel betrayed.
Will power is only the tensile strength of one’s own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.
From someone who doesn’t want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette.
A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man – the one he used to be.