Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

Sadness flies on the wings of the morning, and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.

When you see a woman who can go nowhere without a staff of admirers, it is not so much because they think she is beautiful, it is because she has told them they are handsome.

Little by little, the pimps have taken over the world. They don't do anything, they don't make anything - they just stand there and take their cut.

I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.

There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.

One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.

To seek out in a world full of joy the one thing that is certain to give you pain, and hug it to your bosom with all your strength; that's the greatest human happiness.

A man's name, title, and rank are artificial and impermanent; they do nothing to reveal what he really is, even to himself.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

How can I forgive if you are not ready to give up that which caused you to stumble?

The passion for defiling things was inborn in her. It was not enough for her to destroy them, she had to soil them too.

Only someone obsessed with sexual fidelity to an unhealthy degree places a higher value on preserving the ideal of monogamous marriage over preserving an actual marriage.

Psychoanalysis feeds on intensity, as though life were all flame and no ash.

Any job that posts a price list for your body parts is a bad job.

Let's all start walking more and driving less.

In a world of infinite choice if something is not made specifically for me I'm gone.

People will turn to you, follow you, support you only as long as they are confident that you are doing your best.

You have to be a political leader, willing to lose an election if you want to do what's right.