The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy; they want to be right.
Brave men hide their deeds as decent folk their alms. They disguise them or make excuses for them.
Tolerance is the result not of enlightenment but of boredom.
There is no dark man.
You must make small steps into the air of being yourself. Find yourself in an empty landscape, build your character, and then spend the rest of your life demonstrating it.
When I was a child my ineptitude was a burden to my parents and my teachers. They could not see that it was a greater burden to me. I wondered wanly if I would ever discover how to do anything well. At long last I have learned something even better – how not to do anything at all.
I have this lust for small talk. Nobody escapes my love.
Even in childhood I was mad about men in uniform.
A little old lady once said to me, ‘I have known a great many men. All of them had to be carried every step of the way.
Whereas in the twentieth century, there was a distinction between men and women, in the twenty-first century the lines of gender will become more and more blurred.
Zealots are totally incapable of any emotion other than rage. It is an unalterable law that people who claim to care about the human race are utterly indifferent to the sufferings of individuals.
Now I’ve done and said all I can do and say. I’ve come to the end of my personality, and now if I want anything it’s peace, quiet. The ability, the opportunity to stay in my room and just stagger on. I suppose what I want, in a way, is death.
Humor I think of as the outward sign of the ability to look at events and situations from more than one point of view. It is this gift that keeps us all from living in a perpetual rage.
There are a lot of people in the world who are not loved and we must make an inconspicuous dash to them to save them, to help them. To live a life and not be loved is a terrible thing. And we can spare them that if we are attentive.
Drawing is a science, painting is just something for the long winter evenings.
It doesn’t matter what other people think of you. What matters is what you think of yourself.
I do what I like anyhow any time. My life is one long holiday.
I am consumed perpetually by an inner spiritual flame.
You see, the universe has no meaning and there was no purpose in my being born into it. I never listen to conversations which begin, ‘We are all put into the world for... ’ because we weren’t put into the world. We just happened and we have no purpose and that’s fine.
The scheme entered her head presumably because nature abhors a vacuum.
My fingers will not type the words ‘her money became a burden to her’ but I do think that her wealth was like a lazy servant – better than nothing but a source of unremitting annoyance because it never filled her most urgent needs.