Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.

The very madness of the scheme protects it.

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.

Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.