We are all serving a life sentence in the dungeon of the self.

There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.

Most of the beauty of women evaporates when they achieve domestic happiness at the price of their independence.

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be encountered. Proust in Venice, Matisse's birdcages overlooking the flower market at Nice, Gide on the seventeenth-century quais of Toulon, Lorca in Granada, Picasso by Saint-Germain-des-Prés: there lies civilization and for me it can exist only under those liberal regimes in which the Present is alive and therefore capable of assimilating the Past.

What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?

All charming people have something to conceal, usually their total dependence on the appreciation of others.

The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.