He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.

Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

Anything that consoles is fake.

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.

One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.

Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.

The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

We can only learn to love by loving.

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.

I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says youre important and nice but you take second place all the same.

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

We live in a fantasy world a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at ones luck.

Only take someones hand in a certain way even look into their eyes in a certain way and the world is changed forever.

Being homosexual doesnt determine a mans whole character any more than being heterosexual does.

Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.

As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.

Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends -- and which redeems all the rest.

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.