Illusions are hazardous, and so are disillusions.
For some, bottles of liquor gleam like the towers of Eldorado.
Alcohol postpones anxiety, then multiplies it.
Drunks conjure an endless drama from their bottles.
The psychiatrist’s office: the only place I can be sure my story will be treated as sad, but interesting.
Every perversion has survived many tests of its capabilities.
Perversity depends on reversal and substitution.
Everyone fears and courts his own demon.
What is Providence for you may be Nemesis for me.
Profusion gives pleasure up to a point; then we become squeamish.
The extravagance of intellect outstrips the extravagance of desire.
The eye deals with excess more easily than the stomach does.
Austerity causes constipation; excess, diarrhea.
To make advice agreeable, try paradox or rhyme.
Of course I want to be good, but that may not be to your advantage.
Suspicion is the beginning of wisdom, and of madness.
Old among the young, poor among the rich, I adopt an air of indefinable superiority.
Imprudence gets us into more trouble than actual misdeeds do.
Prudence does not save us, but shows us pictures of our destroyers.
In ethics, prudence is not an important virtue, but in the world it is almost everything.