When you see a woman who can go nowhere without a staff of admirers, it is not so much because they think she is beautiful, it is because she has told them they are handsome.
To win a woman in the first place you must please her, then undress her, and then somehow get her clothes back on her, finally, so that she will let you leave her, you've got to antagonise her.
In war-time a man is called a hero. It doesn't make him any braver, and he runs for his life. But at least it's a hero who is running away.
Each day the worst of our faults, our deficiencies, our crimes, the truth of our lives, is stifled under a triple layer of forgetfulness, death and the ordinary course of justice.
I remember a time when a cabbage could sell itself by being a cabbage. Nowadays it’s no good being a cabbage – unless you have an agent and pay him a commission. Nothing is free anymore to sell itself or give itself away. These days, Countess, every cabbage has its pimp.
There is an invisible garment woven around us from our earliest years; it is made of the way we eat, the way we walk, the way we greet people.
There is no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.
Death holds no horrors. It is simply the ultimate horror of life.
Who would prefer peace to the glory of hunger and thirst, of wading through mud, and dying in the service of one's country?
It's odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for.
A faithful woman looks to the spring, a good book, perfume, earthquakes, and divine revelation for the experience others find in a lover. They deceive their husbands, so to speak, with the entire world, men excepted.
Men should only believe half of what women say. But which half?
The man who discovers a woman's weakness is like the huntsman in the heat of the day who finds a cool spring. He wallows in it.
Half the human race can change its name and sometimes its nation without suffering — at least half! All women!
Oh God, if you want women to never again raise their voices, then create an adult man!
To seek out in a world full of joy the one thing that is certain to give you pain, and hug it to your bosom with all your strength; that's the greatest human happiness.
Government defines the physical aspects of man by means of The Printed Form, so that for every man in the flesh there is an exactly corresponding man on paper.
The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you've got it made.
You're an Attorney. It's your duty to lie, conceal, and distort everything, and slander everybody.
Since I love you, my loneliness begins to throw you.
I have been a woman for fifty years, and I've never yet been able to discover precisely what it is I am.
Little by little, the pimps have taken over the world. They don't do anything, they don't make anything - they just stand there and take their cut.
If two people who love each other let a single instant wedge itself between them, it grows-it becomes a month, a year, a century; it becomes to late.
Only the mediocre are always at their best.
Women have no sense of the abstract-a woman admiring the sky is a woman caressing the sky. In a woman's mind beauty is something she needs to touch.
To have money is to be virtuous, honest, beautiful and witty And to be without is to be ugly and boring and stupid and useless.
Falsehood is the jockey of misfortune.
Faithful women are all alike, they think only of their fidelity, never of their husbands.
A golf course is the epitome of all that is purely transitory in the universe, a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible.
All women are born evil. Some just realize their potential later in life than others.
The brave men die in war. It takes great luck or judgment not to be killed. Once‚ at least‚ the head has to bow and the knee has to bend to danger. The soldiers who march back under the triumphal arches are death's deserters.
Countries are like fruit-the worms are always inside.
Their own kind of logic which cries for miracles and, on occasion.
There's a kind of permission for war which can be given only by the world's mood and atmosphere, the feel of its pulse. It would be madness to undertake a war without that permission.
The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.
Only the mediocre die always at their best. Real leaders are always improving - and raising their bar on how superbly they can perform and how quickly they can move.
As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.
A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal.
There is nothing so wrong in this world that a sensible woman can't set it right in the course of an afternoon.
I believe in the gods; or rather I believe that I believe in the gods. But I don't believe that they are great brooding presences watching over us; I believe they are completely absent minded.
Water is the one substance from which the earth can conceal nothing; it sucks out its innermost secrets and brings them to our very lips.
Everyone always dies for his country. If you have lived in it, well and wisely and actively, you die for it too.
All the evil in the world is the fault of the self-styled pure in heart, a result of their eagerness to unearth secrets and expose them to the light of the sun.
Young girls are the chatelaines of truth; they must see that it is protected, that the guilty lead the life of the guilty, even if the world rocks on its foundations.
Human beings are like timid punctuation marks sprinkled among the incomprehensible sentences of life.
A woman is a creature who has discovered her own nature.
Sadness flies on the wings of the morning, and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.
The stage play is a trial, not a deed of violence. The soul is opened, like the combination of a safe, by means of a word. You don't require an acetylene torch.
In times of death and famine, reason is on the side of the priests-who have their own kind of logic which cries for miracles and, on occasion, invents them.
I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.
The spirit of a nation is what counts-the look in its eyes.
Close your eyes, all you see is yours.
When he (man) ceased any longer to heed the words of the seers and prophets, science lovingly brought forth the radio.
There are truths which can kill a nation.
An agreement is never reached in love. The life of a wife and husband who love each other is never at rest. Whether the marriage is true or false, the marriage portion is the same: elemental discord.
To make ourselves invisible to creditors or to the envious, and even to our own worries, we can take advantage here on earth of a great democratic institution-in fact, democracy's only success-the night.
Death is the next step after the pension-it's perpetual retirement without pay.
A wife loves out of duty, and duty leads to constraint, and constraint kills desire.
Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.
There are no elements so diverse that they cannot be joined in the heart of a man.
Born enemies don't fight. Nations you would say were designed to go to war against each other by their skins, their language, their smell; always jealous of each other, always hating each other; they're not the ones who fight. You will find the real antagonists in nations fate has groomed and made ready for the same war.
During war we imprison the rights of man.
One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.
Everyone, when there's war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.
A man's name, title, and rank are artificial and impermanent; they do nothing to reveal what he really is, even to himself.
Destiny is simply the relentless logic of each day we live.
Is a park any better than a coal mine? What's a mountain got that a slag pile hasn't? What would you rather have in your garden--an almond tree or an oil well?
The innocent one is he who does not explain, for whom life is both a mystery and a total light, one who does not complain... For innocence admits of neither regret nor dispute. The innocent one assumes all responsibility.
Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.
