To establish ourselves in the world, we have to do all we can to appear established. To succeed in the world, we do everything we can to appear successful.

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness, and others by sense.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.

Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.

Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.

Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.

There are no accidents so unlucky from which clever people are not able to reap some advantage, and none so lucky that the foolish are not able to turn them to their own disadvantage.

Don't believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

Trains are wonderful.... To travel by train is to see nature and human beings, towns and churches and rivers, in fact, to see life.

It's funny how you can be mad at someone one moment and want to hug them the next.

Happiness is not at the top of the mountain, but in how to climb.

Language has not the power to speak what love indites: The soul lies buried in the ink that writes.

Life's a lot easier when you're dumb.

Nothing troubles you for which you do not yearn.

"Being a good steward" and "placing your hope in" is not the same thing.

Who needs Satan when you have a God like this?

All affectation; 'tis my perfect scorn; Object of my implacable disgust.