The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love – almost as violent and much more mischievous.
Pully, hauly, tug with a will; the gods wiggle waggle, but the sky stands still.
The only truly consistent are the dead.
Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
In actual life a downward movement may sometimes be made the beginning of an ascent.
When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she – or he, of course, as the case may be – must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.
Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds of hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the precious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible.
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.
Defined in psychological terms, a fanatic is a man who consciously over-compensates a secret doubt.
Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.
Hell isn’t merely paved with good intentions; it’s walled and roofed with them. Yes, and furnished too.
People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.
I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...
You’ve got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can’t think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.
It is natural to believe in God when you’re alone – quite alone, in the night, thinking about death.
The gods are just. No doubt. But their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; Providence takes its cue from men.
Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.
Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a coma.