An ideal is merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale, of some aspect of personality.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

No man ever dared to manifest his boredom so insolently as does a Siamese tomcat when he yawns in the face of his amorously importunate wife.

Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful -- if strenuously led -- as Christian's in The Pilgrim's Progress.

In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.

This really revolutionary revolution is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.

Henri IV's feet and armpits enjoyed an international reputation.