The instinct of acquisitiveness has more perverts, I believe, than the instinct of sex. At any rate, people seem to me odder about money than about even their amours.

Nobody can have the consolations of religion or philosophy unless he has first experienced their desolations.

I am ignorant and impotent and yet, somehow or other, here I am, unhappy, no doubt, profoundly dissatisfied ... In spite of everything I survive.

There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving - by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done.

To be excited is still to be unsatisfied.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.

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.