It can be good to be given what you want; it can be better, in the end, never to have it proved to you that this is what you wanted

There is madness in youth, but sometimes a god inspires it.

One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.

After some years of muddled thinking on the subject, he suddenly saw quite clearly what it was he had been running away from; why he had refused Sandy’s first invitation, and what the trouble had...

We Persians have a saying that one should deliberate serious matters first drunk, then sober.

One might have supposed that the true act of love was to lie together and talk.

A man is at his youngest when he thinks he is a man, not yet realizing that his actions must show it.

There is only one kind of shock worse than the totally unexpected: the expected for which one has refused to prepare.

It’s only since it’s been made impossible that it’s been made so damn easy. It’s got like prohibition, with bums and crooks making fortunes out of hooch, everyone who might have had a palate losing...

It is better to believe in men too rashly, and regret, than believe too meanly. Men could be more than they are, if they would try for it. He has shown them that.

To hate excellence is to hate the gods.

He stood between death and life as between night and morning, and thought with a soaring rapture, ‘I am not afraid.

Alexander could transmit imagination as some other could transmit lust.