There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.
There are three things, and three things only, that can lift the pain of mortality and ease the ravages of life. These things are wine, women and song.
There are seasons of our lives when nothing seems to be happening, when no smoke betrays a burned town or homestead and few tears are shed for the newly dead. I have learned not to trust those times, because if the world is at peace then it means someone is planning war.
There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes.
There are no second chances in life, except to feel remorse.
There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.[Es giebt keine Klassen im Leben für Anfänger, es ist immer gleich das Schwierigste, was von einem verlangt wird.]
There are few things easier than to live badly and to die well.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.
There are always loose ends in real life.
Then he asked me if I wasn’t interested in a change of life. I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all.[Il m’a demandé alors si je n’étais pas intéressé par un changement de vie. J’ai répondu qu’on ne changeait jamais de vie, qu’en tout cas toutes se valaient et que la mienne ici ne me déplaisait pas du tout.]
The whole of life is just like watching a click, he thought. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it all out yourself from the clues.
The whole art of living consists in giving up existence in order to exist.
