Whatever the Benefits of Fortune are , they yet require a Palate fit to relish and taste them; 'Tis Fruition, and not Possession, that renders us Happy.

The value of life lies not in the length of days, but in the use we make of them... Whether you find satisfaction in life depends not on your tale of years, but on your will.

Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.

A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.

There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.

A good marriage would be between a blind wife and a deaf husband.

Experience has taught me this, that we undo ourselves by impatience. Misfortunes have their life and their limits, their sickness and their health.

Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.

The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.

Everybody has. It wouldn't do for us to have all our dreams fulfilled. We would be as good as dead if we had nothing left to dream about.

But some secrets are so strange and so dangerous that showing them to people makes the strangeness and the danger pour into their lives like a dark, dark ink.

Someone asked me, 'How do you write a book?' I said, 'I live with a pen in one hand.

I'm a fabulous date, I make sure I look good, I like hearing what a guy has to say and I make sure the evening is a real laugh. I like to laugh.

Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas.

I don't think anyone chooses the decathlon as much as it chooses you.

I really wanted to go onstage. Not movies. But I ended up under contract to Paramount. Now I adore film work.

I call a fig a fig, a spade a spade.

Immortality. I notice that as soon as writers broach this question they begin to quote. I hate quotation. Tell me what you know.

Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other.