One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more,...

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

Cynical realism is the intelligent man's best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.

You should hurry up and acquire the cigar habit. It's one of the major happinesses. And so much more lasting than love, so much less costly in emotional wear and tear.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as...

Dream in a pragmatic way.

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults...

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

De Sade is the one completely consistent and thoroughgoing revolutionary of history.

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one's life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than 'try to be a little...

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.