The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one...
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...
I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys: the smells of summer, the part of town I loved, a certain evening sky, Mar...
I have to admit it humbly, mon cher compatriote, I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life, which could be heard in everything I said. I could never talk without boast...
And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is scarcely any passion without struggle.
One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn't know.
I love life - that’s my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.
Don’t walk in front of me… I may not follow
I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.
We call first truths those we discover after all the others.
Peace is the only battle worth waging.
The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.