Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.

Cats can be very funny, and have the oddest ways of showing they're glad to see you.

We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.

Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts; and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.

If it really was Queen Elizabeth who demanded to see Falstaff in a comedy, then she showed herself a very perceptive critic. But even in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff has not and could not have found his true home because Shakespeare was only a poet. For that he was to wait nearly two hundred years till Verdi wrote his last opera. Falstaff is not the only case of a character whose true home is the world of music; others are Tristan, Isolde and Don Giovanni.

Life is a picnic on a precipice.

Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.