A sick thought can devour the body’s flesh more than fever or consumption.
You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.
There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress.
The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.
It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.
Life is a slope. As long as you’re going up you’re always looking towards the top and you feel happy, but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death at the end of it all. It’s slow going up and quick going down.
Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched.
Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship’s captain has to avoid a shipwreck.
Whatever you want to say, there is only one word to express it, only one verb to give it movement, only one adjective to qualify it.
Whether we are describing a king, an assassin, a thief, an honest man, a prostitute, a nun, a young girl, or a stallholder in a market, it is always ourselves that we are describing.
Of all the passions, the only one that seems respectable to me is the passion for food.
A lawful kiss is never worth as much as a stolen one.
Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.
If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.
She was the temptress who had ensnared the first man, and who still continued her work at damnation; she was the being who is feeble, dangerous, mysteriously troubling. And even more than her body of perdition, he hated her loving soul.
Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms.
Since governments take the right of death over their people, it is not astonishing if the people should sometimes take the right of death over governments.
Great minds that are healthy are never considered geniuses, while this sublime qualification is lavished on brains that are often inferior but are slightly touched by madness.
We breathe love as we breathe air; we hold it in ourselves as we hold our thoughts. Nothing more exists for us.
Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.