The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.

A cultivated and decent man cannot be vain without setting a fearfully high standard for himself, and without despising and almost hating himself at certain moments.

But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess-player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.

I am alone, I thought, and they are everybody.

It is a law of nature that every decent man on earth is bound to be a coward and a slave

I will put up with any mockery rather than pretend that I am satisfied when I am hungry.

For though your mind is active enough, your heart is darkened with corruption, and without a pure heart there can be no full or genuine sensibility.

Man is fond of reckoning up his troubles, but does not count his joys.

What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning...

Man only likes counting his grief, he doesn't count his happiness. But if he were to count properly, he'd see that there's enough of both lots for him.

I invented adventures for myself and made up a life, so as at least to live in some way.

Love is the absence of judgment.

What happens when you shut your eyes? The images you have been accustomed to look at suddenly disappear. See through the images by closing your eyes and opening your heart.

Living alone, with no one to consult or talk to, one might easily become melodramatic, and imagine things which had no foundation on fact.

You have to read a book at the right time for you, and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature.

Building a little bonfire at night on the beach and lying on a blanket with my wife under the stars is not only sexy, it's romantic.

Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.

The shortest answer is doing the thing.

I think I'm sort of locked into the sitcom genre

I want to hold you, Nikki. Will you let me?

Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.