"Without an adequate theory, reality is irrelevant."

"Some people are so fond of ill-luck that they run half-way to meet it."

"Nature abhors a vacuum. When a head lacks brains, nature fills it with conceit."

"How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers."

"Monogamy is the Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistresses."

"Whatever touches the nerves of motive, whatever shifts man's moral position, is mightier than steam, or calorie, or lightening."

"A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days."

"What is a seer? A man who with luck tells the truth sometimes, with frequent falsehoods, but when his luck deserts him, collapses then and there."

"To the soul, there is hardly anything more healing than friendship."

"A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them."

"Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent."

"I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing."