Top 100 Quotes

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

A powerful idea communicates some of its strength to him who challenges it.

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

Lies are essential to humanity. They are perhaps as important as the pursuit of pleasure and moreover are dictated by that pursuit.

We are healed from suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

It is always during a passing state of mind that we make lasting resolutions.

Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces.

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.

There is no man, however wise, who has not at some period of his youth said things, or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory.

The paradoxes of today are the prejudices of tomorrow, since the most benighted and the most deplorable prejudices have had their moment of novelty when fashion lent them its fragile grace.

Habit is a second nature which prevents us from knowing the first, of which it has neither the cruelties nor the enchantments.

People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others.

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

Let us leave pretty women to men devoid of imagination.

As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress.

The only paradise is paradise lost.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

Our intonations contain our philosophy of life, what each of us is constantly telling himself about things.

Like everybody who is not in love, he thought one chose the person to be loved after endless deliberations and on the basis of particular qualities or advantages.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct proportion to the swiftness of her passing.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.

All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

The time at our disposal each day is elastic; the passions we feel dilate it, those that inspire us shrink it, and habit fills it.

People wish to learn to swim and at the same time to keep one foot on the ground.

Love is a reciprocal torture.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

In a separation it is the one who is not really in love who says the more tender things.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

Three-quarters of the sicknesses of intelligent people come from their intelligence. They need at least a doctor who can understand this sickness.

Those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians.

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one's life.

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

A woman one loves rarely suffices for all our needs, so we deceive her with another whom we do not love.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

We do not succeed in changing things according to our desire, but gradually our desire changes.

The world was not created once and for all time for each of us individually. There are added to it in the course of our life things of which we have never had any suspicion.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

Romantic love is mental illness. But it's a pleasurable one. It's a drug. It distorts reality, and that's the point of it. It would be impossible to fall in love with someone that you really saw.

Polite conversation is rarely either.

If you're going to America, bring your own food.

Food is an important part of a balanced diet.

You're only as good as your last haircut.

My favorite animal is steak.

There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death. Any attempt to prove otherwise constitutes unacceptable behavior.

I must take issue with the term 'a mere child', for it has been my invariable experience that the company of a mere child is infinitely preferable to that of a mere adult.

The opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting.

Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose when unaccompanied by a good cut of meat.

Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky.

In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.

Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications.

As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.

Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not have possibly met.

Never relinquish clothing to a hotel valet without first specifically telling him that you want it back.

To put it rather bluntly, I am not the type who wants to go back to the land; I am the type who wants to go back to the hotel.

Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear the phone is for you.

When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.

Do not, on a rainy day, ask your child what he feels like doing, because I assure you that what he feels like doing, you won't feel like watching.

The conversational overachiever is someone whose grasp exceeds his reach. This is possible but not attractive.

All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable.

Children are the most desirable opponents at scrabble as they are both easy to beat and fun to cheat.

Radio news is bearable. This is due to the fact that while the news is being broadcast, the disk jockey is not allowed to talk.

I've done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not.

Calling a taxi in Texas is like calling a rabbi in Iraq.

I never took hallucinogenic drugs because I never wanted my consciousness expanded one unnecessary iota.

Scientists - the crowd that for dash and style make the general public look like the Bloomsbury set.

The telephone is a good way to talk to people without having to offer them a drink.

Humility is no substitute for a good personality.

In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.

Nature is by and large to be found out of doors, a location where, it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs.

I never met anyone who didn't have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?

Designer clothes worn by children are like snowsuits worn by adults. Few can carry it off successfully.

Stand firm in your refusal to remain conscious during algebra. In real life, I assure you, there is no such thing as algebra.

Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he's buying.

I place a high moral value on the way people behave. I find it repellent to have a lot, and to behave with anything other than courtesy in the old sense of the word - politeness of the heart, a gentleness of the spirit.

If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words.

No animal should ever jump up on the dining-room furniture unless absolutely certain that he can hold his own in the conversation.

Being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women, it is simply a good excuse not to play football.

You can't go around hoping that most people have sterling moral characters. The most you can hope for is that people will pretend that they do.

Success didn't spoil me, I've always been insufferable.

If you are truly serious abut preparing your child for the future, don't teach him to subtract teach him to deduct.

Life is something to do when you can't get to sleep.