We are eager to believe that others are flawed because we are eager to believe in what we wish for.

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.

I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.

I am not a victim. No matter what I have been through, I'm still here. I have a history of victory.

I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don't make up their minds, someone will do it for them.

The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

It doesn't matter if most people refuse to understand nor support my efforts, not at all, it doesn't at all matter. What matters is, I am pioneering a revolution.

Theirs is not to make reply: Theirs is not to reason why: Theirs is but to do and die.

I take a dose of mathematics every day to prevent my brain from becoming quite soft.

I love forms beyond my own, and regret the borders between us

You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, the encountering may be the very experience which creates the vitality and the power to endure.

For it is obvious to everybody, I think, that this study [of astronomy] compels the soul to look upward and leads it away from things here to higher things.