Life blackens at the contact of truth.

Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.

Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows.

An artist never really finishes his work; he merely abandons it

What one wrote playfully, another reads with tension and passion; what one wrote with tension and passion, another reads playfully.

That which has always been accepted by everyone, everywhere, is almost certain to be false.

Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker.

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

At times I think and at times I am.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of...

Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder.

A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone.

Long years must pass before the truths we have made for ourselves become our very flesh.

A man’s true secrets are more secret to himself than they are to others.

We are wont to condemn self-love; but what we really mean to condemn is contrary to self-love. It is that mixture of selfishness and self-hate that permanently pursues us, that prevents us from loving others,...

Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.

Science means simply the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful. All the rest is literature.

Love is being stupid together.

The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.

Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works...

Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.

In poetry everything which must be said is almost impossible to say well.

War: a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other.

To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.

Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.

Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being the helpless prey...

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.

The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.

L’histoire est le produit le plus dangereux que la chimie de l’intellect ait élaboré. Ses propriétés sont bien connues. Il fait rêver, il enivre les peuples, leur engendre de faux souvenirs, exagère leurs réflexes, entretient...

Une philosophie doit etre portative.

Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.

God made everything out of the void, but the void shows through

A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage...

A man who is ‘of sound mind’ is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.

Power without abuse loses its charm

Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable.

A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts.

The ultimate “”computer,”” our own brain, uses only ten watts of power — one-tenth the energy consumed by a hundred-watt bulb.

The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best.

Power without abuse loses its charm.

God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.

Everything that is simple is theoratically false, everything that is complicated is pragmatically useless.

God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through.

Serious-minded people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

A man who is “of sound mind” is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.

For the fact is that disorder is the condition of the mind’s fertility: it contains the mind’s promise, since its fertility depends on the unexpected rather than the expected, depends on what we do not...