We often call a certainty a hope, to bring it luck.

Blessed are those who give without remembering and take without forgetting.

Irony is the hygiene of the mind.

We often call a certainty a hope, to bring it luck.

To others we are not ourselves but performers in their lives cast for a part we do not even know we are playing.

Seeing through is rarely seeing into.

It is sometimes the man who opens the door who is the last to enter the room.

A man who is available for lunch, has no wife, is interested in everything, and talks well is socially invaluable.

All my life, I have loved balloons - all balloons - the heavy English sort, immense and round, that have to be pushed about, and the gay, light, gas-filled French ones that soar into the air the moment you let go of them.

Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?

Friendship is a difficult, dangerous job. It is also (though we rarely admit it) extremely exhausting.

Happiness is a light, an atmosphere, an illumination. It sets a personality. I always feel that it is a creation that is difficult for some and easy for others, but essentially an achievement, never an accident.

I do not know at what moment in life, if ever, we realise that we are neither George Sands nor Juliets. Of course, if we are not beautiful, we recognise early that beauty is nothing.

Isn't that what love means, to fill ordinary, commonplace, conventional things with magic and significance, not to need the moon and white scent-heavy flowers at night?

It is better not to sit on the grass after thirty when sprawling at all is difficult, let alone sprawling gracefully.

Oh, youth is a wicked, cruel thing - eating miracles with its breakfast and not knowing they are not porridge.

Only the artists interest me whose hearts beat in unison with the poignant misery of the world. If you have not felt that, you have not lived. Pity is essential.

Passion is no respecter of persons. She hardly seems to select her victims.

The half-hour of crowded anticipation, how fully it pays for the sterile hour that follows!

The only thing that matters is to have charm and expression. Then comes that horrible gnawing doubt of our own magnetism. Is it possible that, though we are not lovely, we are not irresistible either? That we will have to go through life belonging neither to the triumphantly beautiful nor to the triumphantly ugly?

There is nothing in the world like health. Live cleanly, and the high thinking will look after itself - or at least won't matter. Physical condition - there's nothing like it.

There is something very independent about French balloons - you feel you couldn't make a pet of one.

To some people, the impossible is impossible. One fine day, they wake up in the morning knowing that they will never hold the moon in their hands, and with the certainty, perfect peace descends on them.

What an uncertain thing, marriage - what an elusive thing, happiness!

What is it one yearns for? It is to be able to do a thing for the first time again. And that is impossible.

What you possess is not what you jingle in the pockets of your memory, but the imaginings with which you fill the spaces of the future.

Why don't people take the trouble to let you know that they are alive? It is so much more important. The whole system is wrong. No sooner do I die, than all the flowers I have ever longed for in life pour in.

We often call a certainty a hope to bring it luck.

Entertaining is one method of avoiding people. It is very often the negation of hospitality.

Endurance is frequently a form of indecision.

He is invariably in a hurry. Being in a hurry is one of the tributes he pays to life.

When I tested for Billy Budd, I had that kind of confidence that comes with the certainty that you're not going to get something. I was very rough around the edges.

A liberal knows that the only certainty in this life is change but believes that the change can be directed toward a constructive end.

From this bestial view that the human mind consists of only sense certainty, pleasure and pain, Locke developed an equally bestial theory of the nation. Man originally existed in a State of Nature of complete liberty.

I feel, sometimes, as the renaissance man must have felt in finding new riches at every point and in the certainty that unexplored areas of knowledge and experience await at every turn.

I am certain there is too much certainty in the world.

The only certainty is that nothing is certain.

The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.

The areas of consensus shift unbelievably fast; the bubbles of certainty are constantly exploding.

There is no certainty; there is only adventure.

We can say with certainty - or 90% probability - that the new industries that are about to be born will have nothing to do with information.

If you develop the absolute sense of certainty that powerful beliefs provide, then you can get yourself to accomplish virtually anything, including those things that other people are certain are impossible.

I found it peculiar that those who wanted to take military action could - with 100 per cent certainty - know that the weapons existed and turn out to have zero knowledge of where they were.

From principles is derived probability, but truth or certainty is obtained only from facts.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Fundamentalists are panicked by the apparent disintegration of the family, the disappearance of certainty and the decay of morality. Fear leads them to ask, if we cannot trust the Bible, what can we trust?

It is to be feared that those who emigrate to New South Wales, generally anticipate too great facility in their future operations and certainty of success in conducting them; but they should recollect that competency cannot be obtained without labour.

One must verify or expel his doubts, and convert them into the certainty of Yes or NO.

A bird in hand is a certainty. But a bird in the bush may sing.