One-third of our people were dangerously ill, getting worse hourly, and we felt sure of meeting the same fate, with death as our only prospect, which in such a country was much worse yet.

The truth is that life is delicious, horrible, charming, frightful, sweet, bitter, and that is everything.

Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.

I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.

The fruit derived from labor is the sweetest of pleasures.

I believe there are more urgent and honorable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.

What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.

When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

Sensual excess drives out pity in man.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.

In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge.

The average man does not know what to do with this life, yet wants another one which will last forever.

Silence is the wit of fools.

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.

It is difficult to esteem a man as highly as he would wish.

The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.

Innocence most often is a good fortune and not a virtue.

Business is other people’s money.

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.

Love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking together in the same direction.

Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.

Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I loved.

Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not wish to sign his work.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.

The conscience of the dying belies their life.

If I can’t have too many truffles, I’ll do without truffles.

A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance.

Good taste is the modesty of the mind; that is why it cannot be either imitated or acquired.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

The artist must be in his work like God in his Creation, invisible and all-powerful, so that he is felt everywhere but not seen.

Truth titillates the imagination far less than fiction.

‘Men have forgotten this truth,’ said the fox. ‘But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.’

Nine tenths of education is encouragement.

Finance, like time, devours its own children.

Exuberance is better than taste.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.