I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.

Devout believers are safeguarded in a high degree against the risk of certain neurotic illnesses; their acceptance of the universal neurosis spares them the task of constructing a personal one.

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the...

One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

Are wars anything but the means whereby a nation is nourished, whereby it is strengthened, whereby it is buttressed?

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!