Ideas are to literature what light is to painting.

There is iconoclasm in the excessively intellectual, and they delight in destroying their dearest moral or sentimental idols, the better to prove their strength.

One must live the way one thinks or end up thinking the way one has lived.

We must live as we think, otherwise we shall end up by thinking as we have lived.

There are conditions of blindness so voluntary that they become complicity.

Unhappiness indicates wrong thinking; just as ill health indicates a bad regimen.

There is only one way to be happy by means of the heart: not to have one.

Flirting is the sin of the virtuous and the virtue of the sinful.

There is no such thing as an age for love ... because the man capable of loving - in the complex and modern sense of love as a sort of ideal exaltation - never ceases to love.

A proof that experience is of no use, is that the end of one love does not prevent us from beginning another.

At certain moments, words are nothing; it is the tone in which they are uttered.

Learn this now and learn it well. Like a compass facing north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam.

Moving forward requires that one first take a step.

People are strange . . .

To bracket form and finality out of one's investigations as far as reason allows is a matter of method, but to deny their reality altogether is a matter of metaphysics.

It's a source of great sadness to me that my father died without having seen me do anything worthwhile. He was constantly having to make excuses for me.

It's human nature to be curious about people, and to be more curious about young people than old people. We want to cheer something on at the same time we want to tear it down. That's just so normal.

In the postindustrial age, labor is seen as essentially uninvolved in the social process because there is no need for assertive labor.

In times of shrinking expectations,... everyone feels like a victim and pushes away outsiders to defend his own corner.

Death is God's delightful way of giving us life.

Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions.