We give advice, we do not inspire conduct.

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 began to feel that all the people I'd ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man's wife lived on inside him.

Russian humor is to adapt or make some sense or nonsense out of the insanity of their lives.

I like to think of myself less like 'an adult' and more like a 'former fetus.'

So love the thought of death, love it.

However vast a man's spiritual resources, he is capable of but one great passion.

The import is not the kind of work woman does, but rather the quality of the work she furnishes.

That is the spiral galaxy in Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It consists of one hundred billion suns. Now I think we are small enough.

If you think your job is to fix what is broken, you keep finding more broken places to mend.

Islam is in principle egalitarian, and has always had problems with power.

He who lives only to benefit himself confers on the world a benefit when he dies.