The Cocktail Party Quotes

Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm – but the harm does not interest them.

What is hell? Hell is oneself, hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

Every moment is a fresh beginning.

We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.

Two people who know they do not understand each other, breeding children whom they do not understand and who will never understand them.

To men of a certain type the suspicion that they are incapable of loving is as disturbing to their self-esteem as, in cruder men, the fear of impotence.

That is the worst moment, when you feel that you have lost the desire for all that was most desirable, before you are contented with what you can desire; before you know what is left to be desired; and you go on wishing that you could desire what desire has left behind. But you cannot understand. How could you understand what it is to feel old?

Only by acceptance of the past will you alter its meaning.

It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous. Resign yourself to be the fool you are.

Everyone’s alone – or so it seems to me. They make noises, and think they are talking to each other; They make faces, and think they understand each other. And I’m sure that they don’t. Is that a delusion?

Each way means loneliness – and communion.