Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.

Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.

One of the proud joys of the man of letters - if that man of letters is an artist - is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.

Laughter is the mind's intonation. There are ways of laughing which have the sound of counterfeit coins.

Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum.

Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.

Statistics is the first of the inexact sciences.