We can talk frankly about our defects only to those who recognise our qualities.

People are discontent; men are troubled; and the literature is excellent.

Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

For intelligent people, action often means escape from thought, but it is a reasonable and a wise escape.

He who has found a good wife has found great happiness, but a quarrelsome woman is like a roof that lets in the rain.

The first recipe of happiness -- avoid too lengthy meditations on the past.

To feminine eyes a man's prestige, or his fame, envelops him in a luminous haze which obscures his faults. The triumphs of an aviator, an actor, a football player, an orator are often responsible for the beginning of a love affair.

A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt everyday.

Passionate love produces distorted visions of actual people. Men who are too much in love expect such extraordinary happiness from marriage that they are frequently disappointed.

Old age diminishes our strength; it takes away our pleasures one after the other; it withers the soul as well as the body; it renders adventure and friendship difficult; and finally it is shadowed by thoughts of death.

Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.

A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.

Like a bird, when his cage is opened, stays on his perch, dazzled by freedom, the postponed traveler does not see that his cage, with its bars of anxiety, it is open.

Self-pity comes so naturally to all of us. The most solid happiness can be shaken by the compassion of a fool.

Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy person has no time to form.

It is not events and the things one sees and enjoys that produce happiness, but a state of mind which can endow events with its own quality, and we must hope for the duration of this state rather than the recurrence of pleasurable events.

The first recipe for happiness is: avoid too lengthy meditation on the past.

Style is the outcome of constraint.

A great statesman, like a good housekeeper, knows that cleaning has to be done every morning.