I saw a poet chase a butterfly in a meadow. He put his net on a bench where a boy sat reading a book. It's a misfortune that it is usually the other way round.

The streets of Vienna are paved with culture, the streets of other cities with asphalt.

Someone who can write aphorisms should not fritter away his time in essays.

Corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.

I had a terrible vision: I saw an encyclopedia walk up to a polymath and open him up.

The sound principle of a topsy-turvy lifestyle in the framework of an upside-down world order has stood every test.

An aphorism is never exactly true; it is either a half-truth or one-and-a-half truths.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

Newspapers have roughly the same relationship to life as fortune-tellers to metaphysics.

Christianity has enriched the erotic meal with the appetizer of curiosity and spoiled it with the dessert of remorse.

The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.

I would give away all this superstellar life, all the ranks and honours, simply to be transformed into the soul of a merchant’s wife weighing eighteen stone and set candles at God’s shrine

To be in Christ is the source of the Christian life; to be like Christ is the sum of his excellence; to be with Christ is the fullness of his joy.

Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.

The White House is the finest prison in the world.

If you love something - and there are things that I love - you do want more and more and more of it, but that's not the way to produce good work.

The sorts of sectors which feature so largely in the [Donald] Trump program, and its rhetoric, account now for perhaps only about 15 percent of the American work force.

When my youngest daughter got married, I designed her wedding dress and I really let my imagination and energy go crazy! All the journalists seemed to love that dress.

If people spent one hour per week in Eucharistic Adoration, abortion would be ended

People say they want freedom, but what they really want is freedom from worry. If I take care of their problems, they don't mind being told what to do.

Never again work in the same conditions in whichyou made your first film. It's good to take risks, but not thatmuch risk.