“Plot, the absolute line between two points which I've always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.”

“As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots.”

“A straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.”

“Morality has got nothing to do with the politicians. Simply, because the straight line is considered by them as the longest distance between the two points.”

“In philosophy, as in politics, the longest distance between two points is a straight line.”

“The straight line is regarded as the shortest distance between two people, as if they were points.”

“The real hell of life is everyone has his reasons.”

“People always have two reasons for doing things: a good reason and the real reason.”

“There has always been a temptation to classify economic goods in clearly defined groups, about which a number of short and sharp propositions could be made, to gratify at once the student’s desire for logical precision, and the popular liking for dogmas that have the air of being profound and are yet easily handled. But great mischief seems to have been done by yielding to this temptation, and drawing broad artificial lines of division where Nature has made none. The more simple and absolute an economic doctrine is, the greater will be the confusion which it brings into attempts to apply economic doctrines to practice, if the dividing lines to which it refers cannot be found in real life. There is not in real life a clear line of division between things that are and are not Capital, or that are and are not Necessaries, or again between labour that is and is not Productive.”

“I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life.”