Idleness is only a coarse name for my infinite capacity for living in the present.

Most people do not believe in anything very much and our greatest poetry is given to us by those who do.

Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action.

Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.

A mutually fulfilled sexual union between two people is the rarest sensation which life can provide. But it is not quite real. It stops when the telephone rings. Such a passion can be kept at its early strength only by adding to it either more and more unhappiness (jealousy, separation, doubt, renunciation), or more and more artificiality (drink, technique, stage-illusions). Whoever has missed this has never lived, who lives for it alone is but partly alive.

The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this we are not likely to be forgiven.

Longevity is the revenge of talent upon genius.