If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.
A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of...
Psychology is action not thinking about oneself.
Some, often without knowing it, suffered from being deprived of the company of friends and from their inability to get in touch with them through the usual channels of friendship, letters, trains, and...
Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.
A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
Who taught you all this, doctor?
In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually toward the horizon.
Then, already, it had brought to his mind the silence brooding over beds in which he had let men die. There as here it was the same solemn pause, the lull that follows battle; it was the silence of de...
O young girl, throw yourself again into the water so that I might have a second time the chance to save the two of us! A second time, eh, what imprudence! Suppose, dear sir, someone actually took our...
Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?
Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as t...
At thirty a man should know himself like the palm of his hand know the exact number of his defects and qualities. ... And above all accept these things.
The irrational, the human nostalgia, and the absurd that is born of their encounter - these are the three characters in the drama that must necessarily end with all the logic of which an existence is...
The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, is...