We call first truths those we discover after all the others.
Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which throughout his lifetime he draws what he is and what he says and when the source dries up the work withers and crumbles.
We call love what binds us to certain creatures only by reference to a collective way of seeing for which books and legends are responsible.
Stupidity has a knack for getting its way.
An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. "Can they be brought toge...
There is the good and the bad, the great and the low, the just and the unjust. I swear to you that all that will never change.
We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.
We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the p...
Today we are always as ready to judge as we are to fornicate.
The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.
O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours, too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter I at last discovered th...
Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their...
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.[]
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live as if there isn't and to die to find out that there is.
I know myself too well to believe in pure virtue.
There comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what puni...
I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this...
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.