He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it.

The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.

When some incident has shattered the career you’ve mapped out for yourself, a folly, a crime or a misfortune, you mustn’t think you’re down and out. It may be a stroke of luck, and when you look back years later you may say to yourself that you wouldn’t for anything in the world exchange the new life disaster has forced upon you for the dull, humdrum existence you would have led if circumstances hadn’t intervened.

One does not really feel much grief at other people's sorrows; one tries, and puts on a melancholy face, thinking oneself brutal for not caring more; but one cannot and it is better, for if one grieved too deeply at other people's tears, life would be unendurable; and every man has sufficient sorrows of his own without taking to heart his neighbour's.

If people waited to know one another before they married, the world wouldn't be as overpopulated as it is now.

The fact that a great many people believe something is no guarantee of its truth.

Because a man can write great works he is none the less a man.