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.

Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.

Being in love is an exhausting business.

Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.

People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.