Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.
Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.
You can't love by desiring an extremely vague desire of a very vague moon.
The grinding of the intellect is for most people as painful as a dentists drill.
There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class.
At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer.