“...My husband made my dreams come true, and because he could do that I married him."

“In times of exceptional stress, nature will often give people's behavior so tragical a complexion that neither a picture nor a verbal description is competent to represent its titanic energy.”

“Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.”

“He had no taste for his own company and avoided such an encounter as much as possible, for the last thing he wanted was to make close acquaintance with himself.”

“For vanity, too, inebriates; gratitude, too, intoxicates; tenderness, too, can blissfully confuse the senses.”

“his jest implies: “Anybody who wants to be a real musician must be able to set even a menu to music.”

“Books are my kingdom. And here I seek to reign as absolute lord.”

“We must “conserve the freedom of our soul and not mortgage it, except on those rare occasions when we deem it the right path”.”

“An intellect that does not have a fixed target is as good as lost. Whoever wants to be everywhere is nowhere. No wind blows for him who has no harbour.”

“But we need to make a distinction: we can love this or that, but we cannot “form a marriage bond” unless it is with our own selves.”

“The longest voyage of discovery, the boldest adventure in the records of our race, had begun.”

“And he listened yet more intently to what was within him, to the past, to see whether that voice of memory truly foretelling the future would not speak to him again, revealing the present to him as well as the past.”

“soothing silence instead of an oppressive one.”

“Neither she nor he was the same any more, yet they were searching for each other in a vain effort, fleeing one another, persisting in disembodied, powerless efforts like those black spectres at their feet.”

“And it is only delusion, and not knowledge, that bestows happiness.”

“A life without envy, hatred and lies was not a life worth living.”

“Immer sind die Instinkte wissender als unsere wachen Gedanken.”

“Ambition had never troubled me, so I decided to begin by watching life at my leisure for a few years, waiting until I finally felt tempted to find some circle of influence for myself.”

“All things considered, he stuck to his basic attitude of enjoying wealth by knowing that he had it, rather than by making a great display of it.”

“For tradition also and always means inhibition.”

“That is how our arch-adventurer likes to live, moving on from explosion to explosion of fortune and misfortune.”

“One can run away from anything but oneself”

“The Minister-President or the richest magnate could walk the streets of Vienna without anyone turning around, but a court actor or an opera singer was recognized by every salesgirl and every cabdriver.”

“But this first installation was by no means the last. Every year the Queen had some new fancy for beautifying her miniature kingdom with more highly artificial and more “natural” additions and alterations.”

“For the first time in my life I had received an assurance that I had been of use to someone on this earth, and my astonishment at the thought that I, a commonplace, unsophisticated young officer, should really have the power to make someone else so happy knew no bounds.”

“Art always reaches its peak where it becomes the life interest of a people.”

“She wanted, out of a kind of mysterious vindictiveness born of despair, to torture us with her torture, to arraign us, the hale and hearty, in the place of God.”

“and it was the pride and ambition of the Jewish people to co-operate in the front ranks to carry on the former glory of the fame of Viennese culture.”

“All office workers are afraid of being late for work.”

“Never have I experienced in a people and in myself so powerful a surge of life as at that period when our very existence and survival were at stake.”

“Pity, like morphine, does the sick good only at first. It is a means of helping them to feel better, but if you don't get the dose right and know where to stop it becomes a murderous poison.”

“One goes wherever one is still admitted. Someone told me that I might be able to get a visa for Haiti or San Domingo here.”

“the great masses always and at once respond to the force of gravity in the direction of the powers that be.” “the great masses always and at once respond to the force of gravity in the direction of the powers that be.”

“States of profound happiness, like all other forms of intoxication, are apt to befuddle the wits; intense enjoyment of the present always makes one forget the past.” “States of profound happiness, like all other forms of intoxication, are apt to befuddle the wits; intense enjoyment of the present always makes one forget the past.”

“Only the man who remains free from all and everything augments and sustains freedom on this earth.”

“Consciously or unconsciously, our education renders us slaves to morals, religion and a perceived vision of the world; our breath is the air of the epoch in which we live.”

“He felt a kind of bridal expectation, sweet and sensuous yet vaguely mingled with anticipatory fear of its own fulfilment, with the mysterious shiver felt when something endlessly desired suddenly comes physically close to the astonished heart.”

“The beautiful dream of young love that ventures only on half-measures, that desires and dares not ask, promises and does not give.

Destiny does not always need the powerful prelude of a sudden violent blow to shake a heart beyond recovery.

Memory is always a bond and every loving memory is a bond twice over.”

“ever since he discovered that all his millions could not bring him back his wife, he has learned to despise money.”

“The power of love is not properly gauged if it is estimated only by the object that inspires it, if the tension preceding it is not taken into account - that gloomy space of disillusionment and loneliness which stretches in front of all the great events of the heart.”

“Books are, I find, the best provisions a man can take with him on life’s journey.”

“To be free of vanity or pride, these perhaps the gravest of all indulgences.”

“To guard oneself from presumption.”

“To free oneself from fear and hope, belief and superstition. To be free of convictions and parties.”

“He forgets the books he has read, has no memory for dates and misplaces the momentous events in his life. Like a river, all flows over him, leaving nothing behind: no deep conviction, no solid opinion, nothing fixed, nothing stable.”

“To be free of family and familiar surroundings.”

“To free oneself of ambitions and all forms of avarice: “Thirst for glory is the most futile of all, the most valueless and bogus currency known to man.”

“He is at one and the same time all and nothing, always different and yet ever the same, the Montaigne of 1550, 1560, 1570, 1580, the Montaigne of yesterday.”