A Happy Death

Having money is a way of being free of money.

Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.

Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory...Everything is forgotten, even great love.

Idleness is only fatal to the mediocre.

Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.

He realized now that to be afraid of this death he was staring at with animal terror meant to be afraid of life. Fear of dying justified a limitless attachment to what is alive in man. And all those who had not made the gestures necessary to live their lives, all those who feared and exalted impotence — they were afraid of death because of the sanction it gave to a life in which they had not been involved. They had not lived enough, never having lived at all.

The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.

Fate is not in man but around him.

He marveled at the strange blindness by which men, though they are so alert to what changes in themselves, impose on their friends an image chosen for them once and for all. He was being judged by what he had been. Just as dogs don't change character, men are dogs to one another.

But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.

To have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.

It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.

Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.

It's better to bet on this life than on the next.

He discovered the cruel paradox by which we always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love — first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.