Like all mad men, I thought everyone was mad except myself.

Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly.

To us, it is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England's policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg was wronged. We cannot grasp what connection such circumstances have the with the actual fact of slaughter and violence: why because the Duke was wronged, thousands of men from the other side of Europe killed and ruined the people of Smolensk and Moscow and were killed by them.

Once we're thrown off our habitual paths, we think all is lost, but it's only here that the new and the good begins.

Good fiction doesn't come out of the basic conflict of good versus bad. Instead, it comes out of a conflict between good and good.

Upon meeting, you're judged by your clothes, upon parting you're judged by your wits.

There was no solution, save that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insolvable: One must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget oneself.