Gratitude is like credit; it is the backbone of our relations; frequently we pay our debts not because equity demands that we should, but to facilitate future loans.

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness, and others by sense.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.

Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.

Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.

Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.

There are no accidents so unlucky from which clever people are not able to reap some advantage, and none so lucky that the foolish are not able to turn them to their own disadvantage.

Love is a rebellious bird that nobody can tame.

More than 820 million people in the world suffer from hunger; and 790 million of them live in the Third World.

People at .08 are too impaired to drive. Studies show that at .08, the ability to perform critical driving functions is decreased by as much as 60 percent.

Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades.

Animals, we have been told, are taught by their organs. Yes, I would add, and so are men, but men have this further advantage that they can also teach their organs in return.

For many weeks after [my wife] died, I could not get used to the feeling of coldness and lifelessness on her side of the bed - and it was even worse when they took the body away and buried her.

I totally believe that art is an open dialogue and that it is not logical. It does not always make sense.

After a while, you can't get any higher. It's like your head is in a wind tunnel - everything is vibrating.

An awful lot has been written about my temper.

There is some talk of lowering (the income tax), and they will have to. People are not making enough to pay it.