The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

If one plays good music, people don't listen and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

The reason we are so pleased to find other people's secrets is that it distracts public attention from our own.

When one pays a visit it is for the purpose of wasting other people's time, not one's own.

A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes, it was an interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old.

Believe me, no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is.