Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.

Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.

The more stitches, the less riches.

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.

To be excited is still to be unsatisfied.