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1. No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.
2. The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.
3. A man is never completely alone in this world. At the worst, he has the company of a boy, a youth, and by and by a grown man — the one he used to be.
4. No woman marries for money; they are all clever enough, before marrying a millionaire, to fall in love with him first.
5. One must look for one thing only, to find many.
6. One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love — any love — reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.
7. The only joy in the world is to begin.
8. Will power is only the tensile strength of one’s own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.
9. All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority otherwise called ambition.
10. Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
11. Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.
12. Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.
13. It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative?
14. Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.
15. If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be.
16. Love is the cheapest of religions.
17. The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.
18. He knows not his own strength that hath not met adversity.
19. Lessons are not given, they are taken.
20. Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else’s body.