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

Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.

If Montaigne is a man in the prime of life sitting in his study on a warm morning and putting down the sum of his experience in his rich, sinewy prose, then Pascal is that same man lying awake in the small hours of the night when death seems very close and every thought is heightened by the apprehension that it may be his last.

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be traveling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love.

Like the bee its sting, the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.

Optimism and self-pity are the positive and negative poles of modern cowardice.