Growing old is no more than a bad habit which a busy man has no time to form. - André Maurois

No great amount of experience is required to discover that the greedy search for money or success will almost always lead men into unhappiness. Why? Because that kind of life makes them depend upon things outside themselves.

Balzac says that many young husbands are so ignorant of women that they make him think of orang-outangs trying to play the violin.

He who allows himself to be devoured will be devoured, and he will die before he has done his work. The man who has an ardent passion for work asks of others only what will help him. He shirks no work that ca be of use and that he ca do well, but he flies from conversations, meetings, talkfests, studios full of phrase-makers. Goethe even advises such a man to ignore daily events if he cannot do anything about them. If we spend an hour every morning informing ourselves about distant wars and another hour lamenting their possible consequences, when we are neither ministers, generals, nor journalists, nor anything, we render no service to our country and we waste the most irrecoverable of our possessions: our own short life.