When you see a woman who can go nowhere without a staff of admirers, it is not so much because they think she is beautiful, it is because she has told them they are handsome.

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal.

Human beings are like timid punctuation marks sprinkled among the incomprehensible sentences of life.

To make ourselves invisible to creditors or to the envious, and even to our own worries, we can take advantage here on earth of a great democratic institution-in fact, democracy's only success-the night.

Close your eyes, all you see is yours.

In times of death and famine, reason is on the side of the priests-who have their own kind of logic which cries for miracles and, on occasion, invents them.