Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.

Great love affairs start with Champagne and end with tisane.

Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that’s the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.

The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

Social order at the expense of liberty is hardly a bargain.

All over the land are vast and handsome pastures, with good grass for cattle, and it strikes me the soil would be very fertile were the country inhabited and improved by reasonable people.

If a million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.

One can not be just if one is not humane.

No temptation can ever be measured by the value of its object.

It is better to understand little than to misunderstand a lot.

It is only the poor who pay cash, and that not from virtue, but because they are refused credit.

Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.

One mustn’t look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.

Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me.

I do not regard a broker as a member of the human race.

A friend who dies, it’s something of you who dies.

There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of...

My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others!

Seeing that our thirst was increasing and the water was killing us, while the storm did not abate, we agreed to trust to God, Our Lord, and rather risk the perils of the sea than...

An education which does not cultivate the will is an education that depraves the mind.

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

Prosperity makes few friends.

The faults of husbands are often caused by the excess virtues of their wives.

Suffering! We owe to it all that is good in us, all that gives value to life; we owe to it pity, we owe to it courage, we owe to it all the virtues.

Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin.

The author in his book must be like God in his universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

It is not my mode of thought that has caused my misfortunes, but the mode of thought of others.

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.

It is well for the heart to be naive and the mind not to be.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

A memory is a beautiful thing, it’s almost a desire that you miss.

To be stupid and selfish and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.

All universal moral principles are idle fancies.

Two days after moving we recommended ourselves to God, Our Lord, and fled, hoping that, although it was late in the season and the fruits of the tunas were giving out, by remaining in the...

The greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity.

Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.

I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.

When a thought is too weak to be expressed simply, it is a proof that it should be rejected.

Never touch a butterfly’s wing with your finger.

War will disappear only when men shall take no part whatever in violence and shall be ready to suffer every persecution that their abstention will bring them. It is the only way to abolish war.

Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.

Nature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.

Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.