My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

To forgive is not just to be altruistic.

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

A wise girl kisses but doesn't love, listens but doesn't believe, and leaves before she is left.

But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there.

The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of the engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or defeat. Let nature take its course, and your tools will strike at the right moment.

In the end, everything is a gag.

Insanity in individuals is rare - but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.

Your purpose in life is to find your purpose and give your whole heart and soul to it.

If you have been sunned through and through like an apricot on a wall from your earliest days, you are oversensitive to any withdrawal of heat.

Life does not need to mutilate itself in order to be pure.

If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire, then you got a problem. Everything else is inconvenience.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

Time ripens all things; no one is born wise.

What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the words I have read in my life.

In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.

You are not stuck where you are unless you decide to be.