We love people not so much for the good they've done us, as for the good we've done them.

One must put oneself in every one's position. To understand everything is to forgive everything.

If you want to be happy, be.

But it seems to me that a man cannot and ought not to say that he loves, he said. Why not? I asked. Because it will always be a lie. As though it were a strange sort of discovery that someone is in love! Just as if, as soon as he said that, something went snap-bang - he loves. Just as if, when he utters that word, something extraordinary is bound to happen, with signs and portents, and all the cannons firing at once. It seems to me, he went on, that people who solemnly utter those words, 'I love you,' either deceive themselves, or what's still worse, deceive others.

War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war.

I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.

... women are the pivot round which the world turns.