Solitude will be welcomed or endured or avoided, according as a man's personal value is large or small.

The first rule for a good style is to have something to say; in fact, this in itself is almost enough.

Happiness of any given life is to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free from suffering-from positive evil.

Our civilized world is nothing but a great masquerade. You encounter knights, parsons, soldiers, doctors, lawyers, priests, philosophers and a thousand more: but they are not what they appear - they are merely masks... Usually, as I say, there is nothing but industrialists, businessmen and speculators concealed behind all these masks.

That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom . . .

A man shows his character just in the way in which he deals with trifles, for then he is off his guard.

Mankind cannot get on without a certain amount of absurdity.