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.

The flower is the poetry of reproduction. It is an example of the eternal seductiveness of life.

Men should only believe half of what women say. But which half?

I’m not afraid of death. It’s the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.

There are no elements so diverse that they cannot be joined in the heart of a man.

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.

A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal.

I have been a woman for fifty years, and I’ve never yet been able to discover precisely what it is I am.

One of the privileges of the great is to witness catastrophes from a terrace.

I tell you, sir, the only safeguard of order and discipline in the modern world is a standardized worker with interchangeable parts. That would solve the entire problem of management.

As soon as war is declared it will be impossible to hold the poets back. Rhyme is still the most effective drum.

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.

The secret of success is sincerity.

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.

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.

Those who weep recover more quickly than those who smile.

Only the mediocre are always at their best.

It’s odd how people waiting for you stand out far less clearly than people you are waiting for.

Faithful women are all alike, they think only of their fidelity, never of their husbands.

Everyone, when there’s war in the air, learns to live in a new element: falsehood.

We all know here that the law is the most powerful of schools for the imagination. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets the truth.

Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.