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.

The poor have to labour in the face of the majestic equality of the law, which forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to...

Marriage must incessantly contend with a monster that devours everything: familiarity.

A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

One is never so dangerous when one has no shame, than when one has grown too old to blush.

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.