Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.

  Slavoj Žižek

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit.

W. Somerset Maugham

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious. 

Oscar Wilde

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.

George Bernard Shaw

The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason. 

John Cage

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

Gustave Flaubert

Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything. 

Evelyn Waugh

Nothing prevents me from being a writer except laziness. A good writer.

Why is writing important? Mainly, out of egotism, I suppose. Because I want to be that persona, a writer, and not because there is something I must say. Yet why not that too? With a little ego-building — such as the fait accompli this journal provides — I shall win through to the confidence that I (I) have something to say, that should be said.

My “I” is puny, cautious, too sane. Good writers are roaring egotists, even to the point of fatuity. Sane men, critics, correct them — but their sanity is parasitic on the creative fatuity of genius.

Excerpted from the journals of.

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant re-arrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Joan Didion

A man is what he thinks about all day.

R. W. Emerson

Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.

M.L.K.

Today the artist is no longer constrained by the limitation that all of man's experience is expressed by his outward appearance. Freed from the need of describing a particular person, the possibilities are endless. The whole of man's experience becomes his model, and in that sense it can be said that all of art is a portrait of an idea.

M. Rothko

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

A. A. Milne

When France sneezes, Europe catches a cold.

Prince Clemens von Metternich

I don't want to be a genius - I have enough problems just trying to be a man.

Albert Camus

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

George Bernard Shaw

If there's anything unsettling to the stomach, it's watching actors on television talk about their personal lives.

Marlon Brando

Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.

Alexander Pope

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

Joseph Conrad