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.

The public is a ferocious beast; one must either chain it or flee from it.

One must, in one’s life, make a choice between boredom and suffering.

Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It’s a palliative. The remedy is death.

No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.

The ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.

History should be written as philosophy.

It is not enough to conquer; one must learn to seduce.

Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.

If you aren’t rich you should always look useful.

There are more people who wish to be loved than there are who are willing to love.

Have you noticed with inflexible necessity of the me to insert itself between the sol which precedes it and the sol which follows it.

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

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

My life is a struggle.

Society therefore is an ancient as the world.

The English are crooked as a nation and honest as individuals. The contrary is true of the French, who are honest as a nation and crooked as individuals.

Les personnages de nos autres vies sont des fantômes que la littérature fait revivre.

Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying.

The best is the enemy of the good.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

The secret of being a bore… is to tell everything.

Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man’s power is increased, the checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened.

Scandal is an importunate wasp, against which we must make no movement unless we are quite sure that we can kill it; otherwise it will return to the attack more furious than ever.

Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.

Originality is nothing by judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.

Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.

Ice-cream is exquisite – what a pity it isn’t illegal.

It is the flash which appears, the thunderbolt will follow.

The contemplative life is often miserable. One must act more, think less, and not watch oneself live.

One can’t relive one’s life. Forgiveness is not what’s difficult; one’s always too ready to forgive. And it does no good, that’s obvious.

Society is composed of two great classes those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners.

Prejudices are what fools use for reason.