They know enough who know how to learn.

Philosophy . . .consists chiefly in suggesting unintelligible answers to insoluble problems.

No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

Politics… have always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

I, too, like yourself was a good party man: my party was that of the Church; I was ultramontane. Your party system is one of your thefts from our Church; your National Convention is our...

Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

The first serious consciousness of Nature’s gesture – her attitude towards life-took form then as a phantasm, a nightmare, all insanity of force. For the first time, the stage-scenery of the senses collapsed; the human...

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms...

Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.

For the first time in his life, Mont Blanc for a moment looked to him what it was – a chaos of anarchic and purposeless forces – and he needed days of repose to see...

Morality is a private and costly luxury.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

American society is a sort of flat, fresh-water pond which absorbs silently, without reaction, anything which is thrown into it.

The habit of expression leads to the search for something to express. Something remains as a residuum of the commonplace itself, if one strikes out every commonplace in the expression.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

Susceptibility to the highest forces is the highest genius.

The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.

We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.

The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.

At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.

A parent gives life, but as parent, gives no more. A murderer takes life, but his deed stops there. A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.