Conscience is a cudgel which all men pick up in order to thwack their neighbors instead of applying it to their own shoulders.

It is easy to sit up and take notice, What is difficult is getting up and taking action.

When you doubt your power, you give power to your doubt.

True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure.

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

In diving to the bottom of pleasure we bring up more gravel than pearls.

Love may be or it may not, but where it is, it ought to reveal itself in its immensity.

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.

When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.

A good husband is never the first to go to sleep at night or the last to awake in the morning.

A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.

We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.

Because I am Beat, I believe in Beatitude and that God so loved the world He gave His only begotten Son to it.

Do not give a damn what "they" have to say (and you will know who they are) for you are either very right or very wrong, but at least you are very something.

-(I)n memory, remorse wraps the self.

How did the Prince Charming of my childhood turn out to be such a crushing disappointment? Maybe he wasn't Prince Charming in the first place.

I have lived under totalitarian Communism, so I prize freedom as much as anyone and have long fought for freedom of conscience and speech.

I think everyone is throwing happy stuff at you, and that's when you come over all humbug. It's happy stuff in your face, happy stuff is being sold to you.

If you know somebody very well, like your grandmother or your baby sister, you will know when they are real and when they are fake.

Philosophy is everybody's business.

There is not one text reference to characteristic Protestant religious life in these books... The dominant theme is the denial of religion as an actual part of American life.