One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.

Every coming year is as bad as the previous one, the only difference being that in most cases it is even worse.

Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.

Write, write, write-till your fingers break.

We go to great pains to alter life for the happiness of our descendants and our descendants will say as usual: things used to be so much better, life today is worse than it used to be.

It's better to live down a scandal than to ruin one's life.

It's easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.