Socrates, who was a perfect model in all great qualities, ... hit on a body and face so ugly and so incongruous with the beauty of his soul, he who was so madly in love with beauty.

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.

Ah, he has too many ideas, that man da Vinci. His mind works faster than his hands.

No society has gone the way of gulags or concentration camps by following the path of Spinoza and Einstein and Jefferson and Thomas Paine

The way to be anxious about nothing is to be prayerful about everything.

Ive lived this very dramatic life, with high points and terrible low points. Nothing has been ordinary, and I want to have the experience of the last breath. I want a little drama to it.

People come up to me and say, 'Emo, do people really come up to you?'

I've lived in the same place in London for the last seven years, I go and get my shopping, I get on buses, and [all the rest] is pretty much outside of who I am.

What we do is never as important as how we do it.

We watch our competitors, learn from them, see the things that they were doing for customers and copy those things as much as we can.

The inversion of external compulsion into the compulsion of conscience ... produces the machine-like assiduity and pliable allegiance required by the new rationality.

The changes are part of my writing process. When I write, I imagine scenes. I write things down. I take photographs. I do some casting. I rewrite. It's a permanent making or remaking.