Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
— Cesare Pavese
If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.
All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.
Will power is only the tensile strength of one's own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.
A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man - the one he used to be.
Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.
Lessons are not given, they are taken.
He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.
The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
The richness of life lies in memories we have forgotten.
One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.
The only joy in the world is to begin.
No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love - reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.
Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.
Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.
One must look for one thing only, to find many.
Love is the cheapest of religions.
It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?
Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else's body.
Give me the ready hand rather than the ready tongue.
We do not remember days, we remember moments.
