I was always unlawful; I broke the law when I was born because my parents weren’t married.
The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.
We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.
Most people do not pray; they only beg.
The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.
Indifference is the essence of inhumanity.
Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh.
Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
I don’t like the idea of killing my fellow creatures in order to eat their dead bodies.
Activity is the only road to knowledge.
Though the Life Force supplies us with its own purpose, it has no other brains to work with than those it has painfully and imperfectly evolved in our heads.
No man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.
Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
In the right key one can say anything. In the wrong key, nothing: the only delicate part is the establishment of the key.
A miracle is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.
Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
It is not enough to know what is good: you must be able to do it.