Of all the things which wisdom provides to make us entirely happy, much the greatest is the possession of friendship.

Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you’re feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you’ll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There’s nothing to get excited about. They just know. They’re saviours.

Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.

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

Wisdom is found only in truth.

A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

I do have a lot of gays in my family now, but some will never come out.

Advice in old age is foolish; for what can be more absurd than to increase our provisions for the road the nearer we approach to our journey’s end.

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.

I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.

I’m not a big believer in trying to jam stuff down somebody’s throat: ‚You’re going to do it my way.‘ I’d rather show by example and live my life and have people say, ‚You know what, I want to live like Joel has. He’s got peace and joy, and he seems content.‘

When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a great many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Old age: the crown of life, our play’s last act.

Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind.

My lawyer has been a good friend of mine for a long time. He and I continuously have conversations.

Puritanism. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

The person who doesn’t scatter the morning dew will not comb gray hairs.

The most important thing is to enjoy your life – to be happy – it’s all that matters.

A woman can bring a new love to each man she loves, providing there are not too many.

Our affections as well as our bodies are in perpetual flux.

Things done well and with a care, exempt themselves from fear.

What the heck is true love? I remember feeling, back when I was 12 and ‚going‘ with this girl, ‚Is this true love?‘

I have more friends in New York than Paris.

Do good to your friends to keep them, to your enemies to win them.

It’s always wonderful to get to know women, with the mystery and the joy and the depth. If you can make a woman laugh, you’re seeing the most beautiful thing on God’s Earth.

It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other.

Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty.

So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

You can’t blame gravity for falling in love.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

Plant and your spouse plants with you; weed and you weed alone.

The soul is healed by being with children.

Success in its highest and noblest form calls for peace of mind and enjoyment and happiness which come only to the man who has found the work that he likes best.

Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.

One of life’s terrible truths is that women like guys who seem to know what they’re doing.

Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.

No one has a right to consume happiness without producing it.

I really didn’t consider myself happy or unhappy.

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

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

Is it not important to find out how to listen not only to what is being said but to everything – to the noise in the streets, to the chatter of birds, to the noise of the tramcar, to the restless sea, to the voice of your husband, to your wife, to your friends, to the cry of a baby?

I make decisions all day, so it’s nice for a woman like me to go to dinner and have the man take the menu and say, ‚Let me order.‘ Other women would be offended by that, but I’m like, ‚Good. Because I can’t make one more decision today.‘ I want someone to rub my feet without being asked.

You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?

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.

Maids want nothing but husbands, and when they have them, they want everything.

When I feel I’m doing too much, I do less if I can.

He has the most who is most content with the least.

As a sportsperson, the best thing is people recognising you and loving you for what you do. For me, glamour is 100 people in the hotel feeling happy to see you.

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

If you treat people right they will treat you right… ninety percent of the time.

The earth laughs in flowers.

Until you have cultivated the habit of saying some kind word of those whom you do not admire, you will be neither successful nor happy.

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.

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

I like working. That’s when I’m feeling my best. And the people around me know that. My wife knows that.