every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.

He is every other inch a gentleman.

The word 'idiot' comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: men are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

I see the main problem of my life, and indeed anybody's life, as the balancing of competitive freedoms ... a sense of mutual obligations that have to be honored, and a legal system which can be trusted to step in when that sense fails.

Great music is in a sense serene; it is certain of the values it asserts.

Without doubt cats are intellectuals who have been, by some mysterious decree of Providence, deprived of the comfort of the word.

I have no faith in the sense of comforting beliefs which persuade me that all my troubles are blessings in disguise.