Don't tell friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.

The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection -even though nothing more than the pounding of an old piano -is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.

Don't tell friends their social faults; they will cure the fault and never forgive you.

It is a matter of life and death for married people to interrupt each others stories; for it they did not, they would burst.

Don't laugh at youth for his affectations; he is only trying on one face after another to find his own.

One's own vanities and humiliations I find a delicious subject for conversation. Things said of me behind my back I don't enjoy, and don't listen to them.

This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.