Friendship is but another name for an alliance with the follies and the misfortunes of others. Our own share of miseries is sufficient: why enter then as volunteers into those of another?

How can sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

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.

What do you regard as most humane? To spare someone shame.

I never had a mother. I suppose a mother is one to whom you hurry when you are troubled.

Marriage is like putting your hand into a bag of snakes in the hope of pulling out an eel.

To love is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.

I do love the films I’ve done in the past. I work hard in my movies and my friends work hard and we’re trying to make people laugh and I’m very proud of that.

We do not know what love is. We know the symptoms of it, the pleasure, the pain, the fear, the anxiety and so on. We try to solve the symptoms, which becomes a wandering in darkness. We spend our days and nights in this, and it is soon over in death.

To help a friend in need is easy, but to give him your time is not always opportune.

Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at any time.

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

I mean, families are weird.

Happiness is a hard master, particularly other people’s happiness.

A lot of good love can happen in ten years.

Just like every person who works for Dortmund is a fan of the club, it was the same at Mainz. When I was a player there, we had 800 supporters on rainy Saturday afternoons, and if we died, no one would notice or come to our funeral. But we loved the club, and we have this same feeling at Dortmund.

I admire Ralph Nader and Denis Kucinich very much, and insofar as they bring up issues and carry out an educational and organisational function – that’s important, and fine, and I support it.

It’s amazing if you just listen to people. They tell you all the time things that you can do for them, without even realizing what they’re doing. I’ve learned to take notice of those things and if it’s something that I feel God wants me to do, then I try to do that to add joy to their life.

When you are young, you cannot imagine being disabled. You imagine you would conquer it somehow. As I’ve got older, I can imagine it; I can see how life narrows in. I feel compassion for my mother now.

I think we all have empathy. We may not have enough courage to display it.

I’ve learned that usually, the less I know about other people, the better off I am.

Every man sees in his relatives, and especially in his cousins, a series of grotesque caricatures of himself.

Sometimes I’ve been to a party where no one spoke to me for a whole evening. The men, frightened by their wives or sweeties, would give me a wide berth. And the ladies would gang up in a corner to discuss my dangerous character.

Science arose from poetry… when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

Bo Derek is a really good friend of mine, and I’d like to spend more time with her.

We’re close friends – the American people, the Israeli people, our governments. There’s absolutely no daylight – none – between us and the Israelis on the question of Israel’s security.

You can’t have it all, all at once. Who – man or woman – has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan, I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time, things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.

I don’t think that much about my relationship with my mother and what it did to me. I sometimes feel terrible regret about her, what her life must have been like. Often, when I’m enjoying something, I think of how meager her rewards were and how much courage, in a way, she needed to go on living.

My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.

When you love someone, the best thing you can offer is your presence. How can you love if you are not there?

I’ve never had a dislike for men. I’ve been badly treated by some. But I’ve been loved greatly by some. I married a lot of them.

If I feel good about my parenting, I have no interest in judging other people’s choices. If I feel good about my body, I don’t go around making fun of other people’s weight or appearance. We’re hard on each other because we’re using each other as a launching pad out of our own perceived deficiency.

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women… no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.

If I’m in a political argument, I think I can, with reasonable accuracy and without boasting, put the other person’s side of the case at least as well as they could. One has to be able to say that in any well-conducted argument.

You bring children into the world. You love them with heart and soul.

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.

I’m not denyin‘ the women are foolish. God Almighty made ‚em to match the men.

Part of me feels you can’t say you were truly in love if it didn’t last. If I end up getting married and having kids, that’s when I’ll know it’s real – because it lasted.

I don’t have to ‚freedom-kiss‘ my wife when what I really want to do is French-kiss her.

When the bank asks me about my assets, I include my friendship with Regis Philbin.

I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it’s a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.

The course of true love never did run smooth.

Jealousy is just love and hate at the same time.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.

If you want to know your true opinion of someone, watch the effect produced in you by the first sight of a letter from him.

Life’s too short to hang out with people who aren’t resourceful.

There’s a big difference between falling in love with someone and falling in love with someone and getting married. Usually, after you get married, you fall in love with the person even more.

When you find a guy who is powerful, a big father figure, you latch onto him immediately.

Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.

I don’t know what’s better gettin‘ laid or gettin‘ paid.

Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don’t do any good, but they don’t necessarily do any harm. It’s touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I’ve got my just desserts.

Many people look at me and think they know me but they don’t at all. This is the real me. I am a humble person, a feeling person. A person who cares about others, who wants to help others.

By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll become happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

I’m a girls‘ girl. I have guy friends, but the problem with having guy friends is, like, I always get linked to them, and they’ll end up in a slideshow of people I’ve apparently dated on the Internet.

We just cannot worry about ourselves.

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

Self-interest is the enemy of all true affection.

I feel like my message is to let people know that God is a good God, that He’s on their side, and no matter what happens, He has a great plan for them.

The Tao teaches us not to intervene and interfere. The things we love we have to learn to leave alone. And the people we love we have to learn to let them be.