What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are but how you deal with incompatibility.

To sin is a human business, to justify sins is a devilish business.

The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.

Some mathematician, I believe, has said that true pleasure lies not in the discovery of truth, but in the search for it.

If people lacked the capacity to receive the thoughts of the men who preceded them and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts. And if men lacked this other capacity of being infected by art, people would be almost more savage still, and, above all, more separated from and more hostile to one another. Therefore the activity of art is a most important one, as important as the activity of speech itself and as generally diffused.

Children: a torment and nothing more.

There are such repulsive faces in the world.