We console ourselves with several friends for not having found one real one.

We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder.

Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.

The first recipe for happiness is: avoid too lengthy meditation on the past.

We can talk frankly about our defects only to those who recognise our qualities.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

A happy marriage is a long conversation which always seems too short.

A marriage without conflicts is almost as inconceivable as a nation without crises.

We appreciate frankness from those who like us. Frankness from others is called insolence.

Conversation would be vastly improved by the constant use of four simple words: I do not know.

A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day.

Our choices in life are made according to our sense of our own worth.

I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest caution.

Learn to... be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.

The Lord confers great honor on his servants when he brings them suffering.

Ah love is bitter and sweet, but which is more sweet the bitterness or the sweetness, none has spoken it.

I would rather go while I am being urged to stay, than to stay beyond the time when I should go.

My first record was about childhood. There were a lot of nursery rhyme and fairytale references; it was all about being naive.

Isaiah Berlin described the intellectuals of [Mikhail] Bakunin's "Red bureaucracy" as a "secular priesthood.

As powerful as our legs are, as magnificent as our lungs and arms and muscles are, nothing matters more than the mind.