Experience is a dim lamp, which only lights the one who bears it.

Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices. Politics has once again become religious.

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.

Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.

Men err from selfishness; women because they are weak.

Whatever evil a man may think of women, there is no woman but thinks more.

I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom.

Anyone who seeks to destroy the passions instead of controlling them is trying to play the angel.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

I hate women because they always know where things are.

Is there anyone so wise as to learn by the experience of others?

People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little use in chess.

Prayer is more than meditation. In meditation, the source of strength is one’s self. When one prays, he goes to a source of strength greater than his own.

Man arrives as a novice at each age of his life.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

We never live; we are always in the expectation of living.

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.

Our country is that spot to which our heart is bound.

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair in the face of infinity.

The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don’t go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It’s always so.

The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere.

We cannot wish for that we know not.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise.

Better is the enemy of good.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

One must chose in life between boredom and suffering.

Real worth requires no interpreter: its everyday deeds form its emblem.

If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

Contemplation often makes life miserable. We should act more, think less, and stop watching ourselves live.

Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.

Do you think that revolutions are made with rose water?

The ancients recommended us to sacrifice to the Graces, but Milton sacrificed to the Devil.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.

Paradise was made for tender hearts; hell, for loveless hearts.

The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman.

Truth is a pain which will not stop. And the truth of this world is to die. You must choose: either dying or lying. Personally, I have never been able to kill myself.

Along with the lazy man… the dying man is the immoral man: the former, a subject that does not work; the latter, an object that no longer even makes itself available to be worked on...

It is better to risk saving a guilty man than to condemn an innocent one.

What then do you call your soul? What idea have you of it? You cannot of yourselves, without revelation, admit the existence within you of anything but a power unknown to you of feeling and...

To the wicked, everything serves as pretext.

Business is the salt of life.