Champagne had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

Reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.

Nothing — the only perfection, the only absolute. Infinite and eternal nothing.

Experience is not a matter of having actually swum the Hellespont, or danced with the dervishes, or slept in a doss-house. It is a matter of sensibility and intuition, of seeing, and hearing the significant thing, of paying attention at the right moments, of understanding and coordinating. Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country.