30 pieces of wisdom from Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez novels

Easy rule to live by: if someone's been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, they're probably worth listening to.

Case in point: much-loved, award-hoarding author Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez has plenty to say and it's all worth laminating and keeping in your wallet. We've assembled the 30 greatest pieces of wisdom from his novels to prove that very point.

(Images: Rex Features)

Love In The Time of Cholera (1985)

"The heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good"

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

“There is always something left to love.”

Love In The Time of Cholera (1985)

"When a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about."

Memories Of My Melancholy Whores (2004)

"Love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac."

Love In The Time of Cholera (1985)

“"Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good."

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

"A person doesn’t die when he should but when he can."

The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)

"A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth."

Love In The Time of Cholera (1985)

"There is no greater glory than to die for love."

The General In His Labyrinth (1989)

"Freedom is often the first casualty of war."

Love In The Time of Cholera (1985)

"Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest."

Of Love And Other Demons (1994)

"Crazy people are not crazy if one accepts their reasoning."

Love In The Time of Cholera (1985)

"Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability."

Memories Of My Melancholy Whores (2004)

"No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had."

Love In The Time of Cholera (1985)

"One does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them."

Memories Of My Melancholy Whores (2004)

“Morality, too, is a question of time.”

Of Love And Other Demons (1994)

"Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses."

Memories Of My Melancholy Whores (2004)

"Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened."

In Evil Hour (1962)

"Shame has poor memory."

Love In The Time of Cholera (1985)

"The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not."

No One Writes To The Colonel (1961)

"He who awaits much can expect little."

Chronicle Of A Death Foretold (1961)

"A falcon who chases a warlike crane can only hope for a life of pain."

The General In His Labyrinth (1989)

"There is great power in the irresistible force of love."

Love In The Time of Cholera (1985)

"Nothing resembles a person as much as the way he dies."

Of Love And Other Demons (1994)

"One never quite stops believing, some doubt remains forever."

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

"The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude."

Love In The Time of Cholera (1985)

"The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom."

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

"One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship"

One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

"A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground."

The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975)

"Even the broadest and most useful of lives only reach the point of learning how to live"

Memories Of My Melancholy Whores (2004)

"No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever."