A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

It is not love that should be depicted as blind, but self-love.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

Trust is not the same as faith. A friend is someone you trust. Putting faith in anyone is a mistake.

Hear reason, or she’ll make you feel her.

Remember that creating a successful marriage is like farming: you have to start over again every morning.

A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends.

The rarest quality in an epitaph is truth.

I think, a lot of times when you meet someone, you feel like you need to appear like you’re not interested in them so that they’ll be more interested in you. But what happens when you start showing him that you actually like him? What’s he gonna do then? Play the tape forward; how do you keep a guy like that? I don’t want to sign up for that.

In the real world, children love me.

We’re all going to die, all of us; what a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities. We are eaten up by nothing.

Whoever does not have a good father should procure one.

Every man’s reputation proceeds from those of his own household.

My partner Donald Trump says that married couples should always have a prenuptial agreement. True, a prenuptial is important if one partner is much richer than the other before marriage, but Kim and I don’t have one.

The human animal cannot be trusted for anything good except en masse. The combined thought and action of the whole people of any race, creed or nationality, will always point in the right direction.

My favorite thing in life is writing about life, specifically the parts of life concerning love. Because, as far as I’m concerned, love is absolutely everything.

If you’re in favour of any policy – reform, revolution, stability, regression, whatever – if you’re at least minimally moral, it’s because you think it’s somehow good for people. And good for people means conforming to their fundamental nature.

I want someone who can trust that my big hands are going to take care of them.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

It was a Greek tragedy. Nixon was fulfilling his own nature. Once it started it could not end otherwise.

It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.

I always wanted a family.

A lot of good love can happen in ten years.

It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.

I’m sick of the tabloids‘ saying I obsess over guys. Why would you obsess over guys? They don’t like it.

The concept of loneliness and exile and self-sufficiency continually bucks me up.

For me, when I picture the person I want to end up with, I don’t think about what their career is, or what they look like. I picture the feeling I get when I’m with them.

It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is.

Somehow, we have come to the erroneous belief that we are all but flesh, blood, and bones, and that’s all. So we direct our values to material things.

Man alone is born crying, lives complaining, and dies disappointed.

There is more of good nature than of good sense at the bottom of most marriages.

When your mother asks, ‚Do you want a piece of advice?‘ it is a mere formality. It doesn’t matter if you answer yes or no. You’re going to get it anyway.

Sometimes, I want to talk on a song and be angry, because I am angry. Then there’s always a part of me that remembers that this record lives past my being angry, and so do I really want to be angry about that? Is that feeling going to have longevity?

Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes himself get good things by jealousy, while the other does not allow his neighbour to have them through envy.

My friends, there are no friends.

Both the man of science and the man of action live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it.

If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.

I think there are things that are based in your own dealings with someone that is a personal dealing, not a public dealing. Because you have personal experiences.

A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.

Either he’s dead or my watch has stopped.

I had a lovers quarrel with the world.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it. You’re not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You’re not going to read that book again.

I am not some goddess that dropped down from the sky to sing pop music; I am not some extra-incredible human person that needs to be told how wonderful they are all day and kissed.

Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.

It used to be the case, like you’d switch jobs, and then maybe you wouldn’t keep in touch with all the people that you knew from that old job, just because it was too hard. But one of the things that Facebook does is it makes it really easy to just stay in touch with all these people.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better.

Man is a universe within himself.

I’m more of an adventurous type than a relationship type.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.

If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.

O‘ What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

We want our marriage to be a triumph, not a tragedy.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.

Time stays, we go.