The crowd of influences streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed stupidity is his only refuge.

Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all.

Every past is worth condemning.

Happiness: being able to forget or, to express in a more learned fashion.

The great works are produced in such an ecstasy of love that they must always be unworthy of it, however great their worth otherwise.

A thing can only live through a pious illusion.

We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word.

The power of gradually losing all feeling of strangeness or astonishment, and finally being pleased at anything, is called the historical sense or historical culture.

... a thing can only live through a pious illusion.

This is why magic is worse even than quantum physics. Because, while both spit in the eye of common sense, I've never yet had a Higgs bosun turn up and try to have a conversation with me.

Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.

Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.

I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.

I love my shoulders; they're strong. I like the way they move, and I like the way they look in clothes.

Woman is like the reed which bends to every breeze, but breaks not in the tempest.

I had my back waxed once by two women... and at one point they said, Do you mind if we take a break?

There are no degrees in honorableness. You either are or you aren't.

Marriages we regard as the happiest are those in which each of the partners believes he or she got the best of it.